Cryptonomicon

His fingers slide over a lip and rise up into empty, dark space; he's into the main drift now. He stands up and wades forward. Perfect blackness is cozy and reassuring to him--in it, he can always pretend that he is still a boy, back on Hokkaido. He can make believe that the last few years of his life have never happened.

But in fact he is a grownup and he is trapped in a hole in the Philippines and surrounded by armies of demons. He opens the valves on an acetylene headlamp and sparks it into life. He is perfectly capable, by this point, of finding his way around Golgotha in the dark, but his crew is not, and he leaves them far behind. He stubs his toe brutally on a large gold bar that has carelessly been left lying across the iron railway, and curses.

"Is everything okay, Lieutenant?" says one of his crew, fifty meters behind him.

"Fine," Goto Dengo says, loudly and clearly. "You four be careful you do not break your toes on this bar."

So now, Wing and Rodolfo and their men, waiting up ahead, know the number of Nipponese soldiers they have to kill.

"Where are the last few workers?" one of the crew shouts.

"In the fool's vault."

It takes them several minutes to pick their way through the main vault, because it is packed with treasure. The starry core of a galaxy must look like this. They clamber up the shaft in its ceiling and make their way to the Hall of Glory. Goto Dengo finds the bare wires that lead to the electric light bulb and attaches them to the screw terminals on a battery. Running at the wrong voltage, the bulb looks like a tangerine floating in ink.

"Shut off your headlamps," Goto Dengo says, "to conserve fuel. I will leave mine burning in case there is an interruption in the power."

He pulls a fistful of white cotton from a sterile box. It is the cleanest whitest thing he has seen in several years. He pulls it apart into smaller wads, like Father Ferdinand breaking the bread of the mass, and passes them out to the men, who stuff it ritualistically into their ears. "There is no more time to waste," he hollers, "Captain Noda must be growing impatient out there."

"Sir!" one of the men says, standing at attention and handing him a pair of wires marked MAIN TUNNEL DEMOLITION.

"Very well," Goto Dengo says, and screws the wires down to a pair of terminals on a wooden switch box.

It seems as though he should say something ceremonious, but nothing comes to mind. Nipponese men are dying all over the Pacific without first getting to make speeches.

He clenches his teeth together, shuts his eyes, and twists the switch handle.

The shock wave comes through the floor first, whacking the soles of their feet like a flying plank. A moment later it comes through the air and strikes them like a moving wall of stone. The cotton in the ears seems to accomplish nothing. Goto Dengo feels his eyes bounce off the backs of their sockets. All of his teeth feel as though they have been crisply sheared off at the gumline with cold chisels. The wind is all forced out of his lungs. They are empty for the first time since the moment of his birth. Like newborn infants, he and the other men can only writhe and look around themselves in a panic until their bodies learn how to draw breath again.

One of the men brought a bottle of sake, which has shattered. They pass around the jagged bottom of the bottle, each man taking a gulp of what remains. Goto Dengo tries to pull the cotton out of his ears and finds that the shock wave drove it in so deep that it cannot be extracted. So he merely shouts: "Check your watches." They all do. "In two hours, Captain Noda will demolish the plug on the bottom of the lake and flood the water traps. In the meantime, we have work to do. You all know your jobs--get to work!"

They all hai,turn on their heels, and go their separate ways. It is the first time that Goto Dengo has actually sent men off to their deaths. But they are all dead men anyway, and so he doesn't know how to feel about it.

If he still believed in the emperor--still believed in the war--he would think nothing of it. But if he still believed, he wouldn't be doing what he is about to do.