Cryptonomicon

"Are you telling me she's dead? If she's dead, just tell me."

"No, I have no information that she is dead. But she is a heroine. This is for certain."

The next day, Bobby Shaftoe's malaria comes back and keeps him laid up for about a week. The Calaguas move him right into their house and bring in the town doctor to look after him. It's the same doctor who delivered Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe two years ago.

When he's feeling a little stronger, he lights out for the south. It takes him three weeks to reach the northern outskirts of Manila, hitching rides on trains and trucks, or sloshing through paddies in the middle of the night. He kills two Nipponese soldiers stealthily, and three of them in a firefight at an intersection. Each time, he has to go to ground for a few days to avoid capture. But get to Manila he does.

He can't go into the heart of the city--in addition to being really stupid, it would just slow him down. Instead he skirts it, taking advantage of the thriving resistance network. He is passed from one barangay to the next, all the way around the outskirts of Manila, until he has reached the coastal plain between Laguna de Bay and Manila Bay. At this point nothing is left to the south except for a few miles of rice paddies and then the volcanic mountains where Altamiras are making names for themselves as guerilla fighters. During his trip he has heard a thousand rumors about them. Most of them are patently false--people telling him what he obviously wants to hear. But several times he has heard what sounds like a genuine scrap of information about Glory.

They say that she has a healthy young son, living in the apartment in the Malate neighborhood of Manila, being cared for by the extended family while his mother serves in the war.

They say that she has put her nursing skills to work, acting as a sort of Florence Nightingale for the Huks.

They say that she is a messenger for the Fil-American forces, that no one surpasses her daring in crossing through Nipponese checkpoints carrying secret messages and other contraband.

The last part doesn't make much sense to Shaftoe. Which is she, a nurse or a messenger? Maybe they have her confused with someone else. Or maybe she's both--maybe she's smuggling medicine through the checkpoints.

The farther south he gets, the more information he hears. The same rumors and anecdotes pop up over and over again, differing only in their small details. He runs into half a dozen people who are dead certain that Glory is south of here, working as a messenger for a brigade of Huk guerillas in the mountains above Calamba.

He spends Christmas Day in a fisherman's hut on the shores of the big lake, Laguna de Bay. There are plenty of mosquitoes. Another bout of malaria strikes him then; he spends a couple of weeks wracked with fever dreams, having bizarre nightmares about Glory.

Finally he gets well enough to move again, and hitches a boat ride into the lakeside town of Calamba. The black volcanoes that loom above it are a welcome sight. They look nice and cool, and they remind him of the ancestral Shaftoe territory. According to their family lore, the first Shaftoes to come to America worked as indentured servants in tobacco and cotton fields, raising their eyes longingly towards those cool mountains as they stooped in sweltering fields. As soon as they could get away, they did, and headed uphill. The mountains of Luzon beckon Shaftoe in the same way--away from the malarial lowlands, up towards Glory. His journey's almost over.

But he gets stuck in Calamba, forced to hide in a boathouse, when the city's Nipponese Air Force troops begin gathering their forces for some kind of a move. Those Huks up on the mountain have been giving them a hard time, and the Nips are getting crazed and vicious.

The leader of the local Huks finally sends an emissary to get Shaftoe's story. The emissary goes away and several days pass. Finally a Fil-American lieutenant returns bearing two pieces of good news: the Americans have landed in force at Lingayen Gulf, and Glory is alive and working with the Huks only a few miles away.

"Help me get out of this town," Shaftoe pleads. "Take me out in a boat on the lake, drop me off in the countryside, then I can move."

"Move where?" says the lieutenant, playing stupid.

"To the high ground! To join those Huks!"

"You would be killed. The ground is booby-trapped. The Huks are extremely vigilant."

"But--"

"Why don't you go the other way?" the lieutenant asks. "Go to Manila."

"Why would I want to go there?"

"Your son is there. And that is where you are needed. Soon the big battle will be in Manila."

"Okay," Shaftoe says, "I'll go to Manila. But first I want to see Glory."

"Ah," the lieutenant says, as if light has finally dawned. "You say you want to see Glory."

"I'm not just saying it. I do want to see Glory."

The lieutenant exhales a cloud of cigarette smoke and shakes his head. "No you don't," he says flatly.

"What?"

"You don't want to see Glory."