Cryptonomicon

Four days on the pamboat ensue. It putts along at a steady ten kilometers per hour day and night, and it sticks to shallow coastal waters along the periphery of the Sulu Sea. They are lucky with the weather. They stop twice on Palawan and once on Mindoro to take on diesel fuel and to barter for unspecified commodities. Cargo goes down in the hull, people go above it on the deck, which is just a few loose planks thrown crosswise over the gunwales. Randy feels more out-and-out lonely than he has since he was a teenaged geek, but he's not sad about it. He sleeps a lot, perspires, drinks water, reads a couple of books, and dicks around with his new GPS receiver. Its most salient feature is a mushroom-shaped external antenna that can pick up weak signals, which ought to be useful in triple-canopy jungle. Randy has punched Golgotha's latitude and longitude into its memory, so that by hitting a couple of buttons he can instantly see how far away it is, along what heading. From Tom Howard's beach it's almost exactly a thousand kilometers. When the pamboat finally noses up on a tidal mudflat in southern Luzon, and Randy sloshes ashore in full MacArthurian style, the distance is only about forty clicks.

But tumbledown volcanoes rise before him, black and mist-shrouded, and he knows from experience that forty kilometers in boondocks will be much rougher going than the first nine hundred and sixty.

The bell tower of an old Spanish church rises up above the coconut palms not far away, carved from blocks of volcanic tuff that are beginning to glow in the lambency of another damn mind-blowing tropical sunset. After he's snagged some extra bottles of water and said his good-byes to Leon and the family, Randy walks towards it. As he goes, he erases the memory of Golgotha's location from his GPS, just in case it gets confiscated or ripped off.

The next thought he has says something about his general frame of mind: that nuts are the genitalia of trees is never more obvious than when you are looking at a cluster of swelling young coconuts nestled in the hairy dark groin of a palm tree. It's surprising that the Spanish missionaries didn't have the whole species eradicated. Anyway, by the time he's reached the church, he's picked up a retinue of little bare-chested Filipino kids who apparently aren't used to seeing white men materialize out of nowhere. Randy's not crazy about this, but he'll settle for no one summoning the police.

A Nipponese sport-utility vehicle of the adorably styled, alarmingly high-center-of-gravity school is parked in front of the church, ringed by impressed villagers. Randy wonders if they could have done this any more conspicuously. A fiftyish driver leans against the front bumper smoking a cigarette and shooting the breeze with some local dignitaries: a priest and, for god's sake, a cop with a fucking bolt-action rifle. Just about everyone in sight is smoking Marlboros, which have apparently been distributed as a goodwill gesture. Randy's got to get himself back into a Philippine frame of mind: the way to sneak into the country is not to mount some cloak-and-dagger operation, crawling up onto an isolated beach in a matte black wetsuit in the middle of the night, but simply to waltz in and make friends with all of the people who see you. Because it's not like they're stupid; they are going to see you.

Randy smokes a cigarette. He had never done this in his life until a few months ago, when he finally got it through his head that it was a social thing, that some people take it as an insult when you turn down an offered cigarette, and that a few smokes weren't going to kill him in any case. None of these people, except for the driver and the priest, speaks a word of English, and so this is the only way he can communicate with them. Anyway, given all the other changes he's gone through, why the hell shouldn't he become a cigarette smoker while he's at it? Maybe next week he'll be shooting heroin. For something disgusting and lethal, cigarettes are amazingly enjoyable.