Cryptonomicon

A pamboat is drawn up on the beach, and a couple of families' worth of badjao kids are tear-assing around, exactly like kids at a rest area on the interstate who know that in ten minutes they have to get back into the Winnebago. The boat's main hull is carved from a single rainforest tree, fifty feet long if it's an inch, narrow enough at its widest point that Randy could sit in the middle and touch both gunwales with out stretched hands. Most of the hull's shaded under a thatched roof of palm fronds, almost all grey-brown from age and salt-spray, though in one place an older woman is patching it with fresh greens and plastic twine. On each side a narrow bamboo outrigger is connected to the hull by bamboo poles. There's a sort of bridge that sticks way out over the bow, painted with bright red and green and yellow curlicues, like chains of vortices thrown off in the wake of a boat and reflecting the colors of a tropical sunset.

Speaking of which, the sun's going down right now, and they are making preparations to bring the final load, of gold up out of the hull of the pamboat. The land drops so precipitously towards the water that there's no road access to the beach, which is probably a good thing since they want this to be as private as possible. But Tom Howard had a lot of heavy stuff shipped in here when he was constructing his house, and so he already has a short section of narrow-gauge railway in place. This sounds more impressive than it is: a pair of steel I-beams, already rusting, bracketed to half-buried concrete ties, running fifty yards straight up a forty-five-degree slope to a small plateau that's accessible via private road. There he's got a diesel-powered winch that he can use to drag stuff up the rails. It is more than adequate for this evening's job, which is to move a couple of hundred kilograms of bullion--the last of the gold from the sunken submarine--up from the beach and into the vault in his house. Tomorrow, he and the others can truck it into downtown Kinakuta at their leisure, and turn it into strings of bits representing very large numbers with noteworthy cryptological properties.

The badjaos share the same maddening refusal to be exotic that Randy has found everywhere on his travels: the guy who's running the show insists that his name is Leon, and the kids on the beach are forever copping stereotyped martial-arts poses and hollering "hi-yaaa!" which Randy knows is a Power Rangers thing, because Avi's kids did exactly the same thing until their father banned all Power Ranger emulation inside the house. When the first milk crate full of gold bars is dropped off the high bridge of the pamboat by Leon, and half-buries itself in the floury damp sand below, Avi stands over it and tries to utter some kind of solemn prayer for the dead in Hebrew, and gets maybe half a dozen phonemes into it before two of the badjao kids, having pegged him as a permanent stationary object, decide to use him as tactical cover, and take up positions on either side of him madly hi-yaaaing each other. Avi's not so full of himself that he can't see the humor in this, and yet not so sentimental that he doesn't obviously want to strangle them.

John Wayne is patrolling the surf with a cigarette and a pump shotgun. Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe rates the probability of frogman attack rather low because the gold in the pamboat is only worth two and half million dollars, an amount that hardly rates anything as elaborate, and expensive, as a seaborne assault. John Wayne needs to be there in case someone gets the mistaken impression that they've somehow managed to pack ten or twenty times that much gold into the pamboat. This seems improbable from a hydrodynamics standpoint. But Doug says that overestimating the intelligence of the enemy is, if anything, more dangerous than underestimating it. He, Tom Howard, and Jackie Woo are up the hill guarding the roadhead with assault rifles. Tom's been positively strutting. All of his fantasies are coming true in this little tableau.

A large plastic box thuds into the sand, breaks open, and spills out a mess of shattered coral. Randy strolls over to it and sees leaves of gold inside the coral carapace, tiny holes punched into them. To him the holes are more interesting than the gold.