Cryptonomicon

He comes up the main ventilation shaft to the top of the ridge, where it's broad daylight. He is crushed to discover that there is no battle underway. MacArthur isn't going to rescue him. Lieutenant Mori has brought almost all of the workers up here, and they are hauling on ropes, dragging Bundok's heavy equipment up and throwing it down into the recently dug "ventilation shafts." Both of the trucks are up here, and men with torches and sledgehammers are breaking them up into pieces small enough to drop down the shafts. Goto Dengo arrives just in time to see the engine block of the radio station's generator tumbling down a shaft into blackness. The rest of the radio gear follows it directly.

Somewhere nearby, concealed in the trees, someone is grunting heavily, doing some kind of hard physical labor. It is a practiced martial-arts type of grunt, from way down in the diaphragm.

"Lieutenant Goto!" says Captain Noda. He is daft with alcohol. "Your duties are below."

"What was that loud noise?"

Noda beckons him over to an outcropping from which they can see down into the valley of the Tojo River. Goto Dengo, unsteady for any number of reasons, suffers a spell of dizziness and nearly falls off. The problem is disorientation: he does not recognize the river. Until now, it has always been a few trickles of water braided down a rocky bed. Even before they ran a road up it, you could get up almost as far as the waterfall by hopping from one dry rock to the next.

Now, all of a sudden, the river is wide, deep, and murky. The tips of a few big rocks protrude from the surface here and there.

He remembers something he saw a hundred years ago, in a previous incarnation, on another planet: a bedsheet from the Manila Hotel with a crude map sketched on it. The Tojo River drawn in with a fat trail of blue fountain-pen ink.

"We dynamited the rockfall," Noda says, "according to the plan."

Long ago, they had poised rocks above a bottleneck in the river, ready to create a little dam. But setting off that dynamite was supposed to be almost the last thing they did before sealing themselves up inside.

"But we are not ready," Goto Dengo says.

Noda laughs. He seems quite high-spirited. "You have been telling me for a month that you are ready."

"Yes," Lieutenant Goto says, slowly and thickly, "you are right. We are ready."

Noda slaps him on the back. "You must get to the main entrance before it floods."

"My crew?"

"Your crew is waiting for you there."

Goto Dengo begins walking towards the trail that will take him down to the main entrance. Along the way, he passes the top of another ventilation shaft, Several dozen workers are queued up there, thumbs lashed together behind their backs with piano wire, guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets. One by one, prisoners kneel at the lip of the shaft. Lieutenant Mori whips his officer's sword into the nape of each neck with a terrific grunt. Head and body tumble forward into the ventilation shaft and thud meatily into other bodies, far below, a couple of seconds later. Every leaf and pebble within a three-meter radius of the shaft opening is saturated with bright red blood, and so is Lieutenant Mori.

"Don't worry about that," Captain Noda says. "I will see to it that the tops of the shafts are backfilled with rubble, as we discussed. The jungle will grow over them long before the Americans ever find this place."

Goto Dengo averts his eyes and turns to leave.

"Lieutenant Goto!" says a voice. He turns around. It is Lieutenant Mori, pausing for a moment to catch his breath. A Filipino kneels before him, mumbling a prayer in Latin, fumbling with a rosary that dangles from his bound hands.

"Yes, Lieutenant Mori."

"According to my roster, six prisoners are signed out to you. I will need them."

"Those six prisoners are down below, helping to load in the last shipment."

"But all of the shipment is inside the tunnels now."

"Yes, but not well placed. The entire purpose of the fool's vault is ruined if we strew gold and diamonds around the place in such a way as to lead thieves deeper into the caverns. I need these men to continue that work."

"You take full responsibility for them?"

"I do," Goto Dengo says.

"If there are only six," Captain Noda says, "then your crew should be able to keep them under control."

"I will see you at Yasukuni, Goto Dengo," says Lieutenant Mori.

"I will look forward to it," Goto Dengo says. He does not add that Yasukuni must be a very crowded place by now, and they will probably have a terrible time finding each other.

"I envy you. The end will be longer and harder for those of us on the outside." Lieutenant Mori snaps his blade into the back of the Filipino's head, cutting him off between an Ave and a Maria.

"Your heroism will not go unrewarded," Goto Dengo says.