Cryptonomicon

No one runs out of it; no cries or screams can be heard in between the explosions. The place is empty.

They break down the barricaded door of a drugstore across the street and have a chat with the sole living occupants: a seventy-five-year-old woman and a six-year-old boy. The Nipponese came through the neighborhood a couple of days ago, she says, heading north, in the direction of Intramuros. They herded the women and children out of the buildings and marched them in one direction. They pulled out all of the men, and the boys over a certain age, and marched them off in another. She and her grandson escaped by hiding in a cupboard.

Shaftoe and his squad emerge from the drugstore onto the street, leaving the padre behind to grease some heavenly skids. Fifteen seconds later, two of them are killed by shrapnel from an antipersonnel round that detonates above the street nearby. The remainder of the squad backs right into a group of marauding Nipponese stragglers coming around the corner, and a completely insane close-quarters firefight ensues. They have the Nips heavily outgunned, but half of Shaftoe's men are too stunned to fight. They are accustomed to the jungle. Some of them have never been to the city before, even in peacetime, and they just stand there gaping. Shaftoe ducks into a doorway and begins to make a fantastic amount of noise with his trench broom. The Nips start throwing grenades around like firecrackers, doing as much damage to themselves as to the Huks. The engagement is ridiculously confused, and doesn't really end until another artillery round comes in, kills several of the Nips, and leaves the rest so stunned that Shaftoe is able to walk out in the open and dispatch them with shots from his Colt.

They drag two of their wounded into the drugstore and leave them there. One other man is dead. They are down to five fighting men and one increasingly busy padre. Their firefight has brought down another barrage of antipersonnel artillery, and so the best they can do for the rest of the day is find a basement to hide in, and try to get some sleep.

Shaftoe sleeps hardly at all, and so when night falls he takes a couple of benzedrine tablets, shoots a bit of morphine to take the edge off, and leads his squad out into the streets. The next neighborhood to the north is called Ermita. It has a lot of hotels. After Ermita is Rizal Park. The walls of Intramuros rise up from Rizal Park's northern edge. After Intramuros is the Pasig River, and MacArthur's on the far side of the Pasig. So if Shaftoe's son and the rest of the Altamiras are still alive, they have to be somewhere in the couple of miles between here and Fort Santiago on the near bank of the Pasig.

Shortly after they cross into the neighborhood of Ermita, they happen upon a stream of blood trickling out of a doorway, across the sidewalk, into the gutter. They kick down the door of the building and discover that its ground floor is filled with the corpses of Filipino men--several dozen in all. All of them have been bayoneted. One is still alive. Shaftoe and the Huks carry him out onto the sidewalk and begin looking for some place to put him while the padre circulates through the building, touching each corpse briefly and muttering something in Latin. When he comes out, he is bloody up to the knees.

"Any women? Children?" Shaftoe asks him. The padre shakes his head no.

They are only a few blocks from the Philippine General Hospital, so they carry the wounded man in that direction. Coming around the corner they see that the hospital's buildings have been half destroyed by MacArthur's artillery, and the grounds are covered with human beings laid out on sheets. Then they realize that the men circulating around the area, carrying rifles, are Nipponese troops. A couple of shots are fired in their direction. They have to duck into an alley and set the wounded man down. A few moments later, a trio of Nipponese soldiers appears in hot pursuit. Shaftoe has had enough time to think this one through, so he lets them get a good few paces into the alley. Then he and the Huks kill them silently, with blades. By the time reinforcements have been sent out after them, Shaftoe and his group have disappeared into the alleyways of Ermita, which in many places are running red with the blood of slaughtered Filipino men, and boys.

Chapter 84 CAPTIVITY

"Someone is trying to send you a message," Attorney Alejandro says, scant minutes into his first interview with his new client.

Randy's ready for it. "Why does everyone here have these incredibly cumbersome ways of sending me messages? Don't you people have e-mail?"