Cryptonomicon

A couple of squads of Nipponese Air Force soldiers, armed with rifles and Nambus, pursue Bobby Shaftoe and his crew of Huks towards the Manila Bay seawall. If it comes to the point where they must stand and slug it out, they can probably kill a lot of Nips before they are overwhelmed. But they are here to find and assist the Altamiras, not to die heroically, and so they retreat through the neighborhood of Ermita. One of MacArthur's circling Piper Cubs catches sight of one of those Nip squads as it is clambering over the ruins of a collapsed building, and calls in a strike--artillery rounds spiral in from the north like long passes in a football game. Shaftoe and the Huks try to time the incoming rounds, guessing at how many tubes are firing on them, trying to run from one place of concealment to the next when they think there's going to be a few seconds' pause in the shrapnel. Maybe half of the Nips are killed or wounded by this barrage, but they are fighting at such close quarters that two of Shaftoe's Huks are hit as well. Shaftoe is trying to drag one of them out of danger when he looks down and sees that he is stomping across a mess of shattered white crockery that is marked with the name of a hotel--the same hotel where he slow-danced with Glory on the night that the war started.

The wounded Huks are still capable of moving and so the retreat continues. Shaftoe's calming down a bit, thinking about the situation with more clarity. The Huks find a good defensive position and stall the attackers for a few minutes while he gets his bearings, works out a plan. Fifteen minutes later, the Huks abandon their position and fall back in panic, or appear to. About half of the Nipponese squad rushes forward in pursuit and finds that they have been lured into a killing ground, a cul-de-sac created by the partial collapse of a building into an alley. One of the Huks opens up with a tommy gun while Shaftoe--who stayed behind, hiding in a burned-out car--heaves grenades at the other half of the squad, pinning them down and preventing them from coming to help their comrades who are being noisily slaughtered.

But these Nips are relentless. They regroup under a surviving officer and continue their pursuit. Shaftoe, now on his own, ends up being chased around the foundations of another hotel, a luxury place that rises up above the bay, near the American Embassy. He trips over the body of a young woman who apparently leaped, fell, or was thrown from one of the windows. Crouching behind some shrubbery for a breather, he hears a shrill keening drifting out of the hotel's windows. The place is full of women, he realizes, and all of them are either screaming or sobbing.

His pursuers seem to have lost track of him. The Huks have lost him, too. Shaftoe stays there for a while, listening to all of those women, wishing he could go inside and do something for them. But the place must be filled with Nip soldiers, or else the women wouldn't be screaming as they are.

He listens carefully for a while, trying to ignore the lamentations of the women. A fourteen-year-old girl in a bloody nightgown plummets down from the fifth floor of the hotel, thuds into the ground like a sack of cement, and bounces once. Shaftoe closes his eyes and listens until he is absolutely sure that he does not hear any children.

The picture's getting clearer now. The males are marched away and killed. The women are marched off in another direction. Young women without children are brought to this hotel. Women with children must have been taken somewhere else. Where?

He hears tommy gun fire on the other side of the hotel. It must be his buddies. He creeps around to a corner of the hotel and listens again, trying to figure out where they are--somewhere in Rizal Park, he thinks. But then MacArthur's artillery opens up hell-for-leather and the world begins to heave beneath him like a rug being shaken, and he can't hear trench brooms or screaming women or anything. He has a view east and south towards the parts of Ermita and Malate from which they have just come, and he can see big pieces of debris spinning up from the ground over there, and gouts of dust. He has seen enough of war to know what it means: the Americans are advancing from the south now as well,pushing towards Intramuros. Shaftoe and his band of Huks were operating on their own, but it appears that they have inadvertently served as harbingers of a big infantry thrust.