Cryptonomicon

Shaftoe's head is clearing now. He rubs his eyes and takes a better look. A couple of miles off to port, a steel drum full of fuel takes off into the sky like a rocket, and disappears. He begins to make out the bony silhouettes of palm trees along the lake shore, standing out against the flames. The boat moves on across the warm water quietly, tiny waves chiming against its hull. Shaftoe feels as if he has just been born, a new person coming into a new world.

Anyone else would ask why they are traveling into the burning city, instead of running away from it. But Shaftoe doesn't ask, any more than a newborn infant would ask questions. This is the world he has been born into, and he looks at it wide-eyed.

The man who has been speaking to him is sitting on a gunwale next to Shaftoe, a pale face hovering above a black garment, a white rectangular notch in his collar. The light of the burning city refracts warmly in a string of amber beads from which depends, a heavy, swinging crucifix. Shaftoe lies back down in the hull of the boat and stares up at him for awhile.

"They gave me morphine."

"I gave you morphine. You were difficult to control."

"I apologize, sir," Shaftoe says with profound sincerity. He remembers those China Marines who went Asiatic on the trip down from Shanghai, and how they disgraced themselves.

"We could not tolerate noise. The Nipponese would have found us."

"I understand."

"Seeing Glory was a very bad shock for you."

"Level with me, padre," says Bobby Shaftoe. "My boy. My son. Is he a leper too?"

The black eyes close, and the pale face moves back and forth in a no. "Glory contracted the disease not long after the child was born, working in a camp in the mountains. The camp was not a very clean place."

Shaftoe snorts. "No shit, Sherlock!"

There is a long, uncomfortable silence. Then the padre says, "I have already taken confessions from the other men. Would you like me to take yours now?"

"Is that what Catholics do when they're about to die?"

"They do it all the time. But yes, it is advisable to confess immediately before death. It helps--what is the expression--grease the skids. In the afterlife."

"Padre, it looks to me like we're only an hour or two away from hitting the beach. If I start confessing my sins to you right now, I might get up to stealing cookies from the cookie jar when I was eight years old."

The padre laughs. Someone hands Shaftoe a cigarette, already lit. He takes a big suck on it.

"We wouldn't have time to get into any of the good stuff, like nailing Glory and killing a whole lot of Nips and Krauts." Shaftoe thinks about it for a minute, enjoying the cigarette. "But if this is one of those deals where we are all going to die--and it sure looks like one of those deals to me--there is one thing I gotta do. Is this boat going back to Calamba?"

"We hope that the owner can take some women and children back across the lake."

"Anyone got a pencil and paper?"

Someone passes up a pencil stub, but there is no paper to be found. Shaftoe searches his pockets and finds nothing but a skein of I SHALL RETURN condoms. He opens one of them, peeling the halves of the wrapper apart carefully, and tosses the rubber into the lake. Then he spreads the wrapper out on the top of an ordnance crate and begins to write: "I, Robert Shaftoe, being of sound mind and body, hereby leave all of my worldly goods, including my military death benefits, to my natural-born son, Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe."

He looks up into the burning city. He considers adding something like, "if he's still alive," but nobody likes a whiner. So he just signs the fucking thing. The padre adds his signature as witness. Just to add some extra credibility, Shaftoe pulls off his dog tags and wraps the will around them, then wraps the dog tags' chain around the whole thing. He passes it down to the stern of the boat, where the boatman pockets it and cheerfully agrees to do the right thing with it when he gets back to Calamba.

The boat isn't wide, but it's very long and has a dozen Huks crammed onto it. All of them are armed to the teeth with ordnance that has obviously come off an American submarine recently. The weight of men and weaponry keeps the boat so low in the water that waves occasionally splash over the gunwales. Shaftoe paws through crates in the dark. He can't see for shit, but his hands identify, the components of a few Thompson submachine guns down in there.

"Parts for weapons," one of the Huks explains to him, "don't lose those!"

"Parts, nothing!" Shaftoe says, a few busy seconds later. He produces a fully assembled trench broom from the crate. The red coals of half a dozen I SHALL RETURN cigarettes leap upwards into the Huks' mouths as they free their hands for a light round of applause. Someone passes him a pie-shaped magazine, heavy with .45 caliber cartridges. "Y'know,they invented this kind ammo just to knock down crazy Filipino bastards," Shaftoe announces.

"We know," one of the Huks says.