Cryptonomicon

"We took the gold that you recovered from the submarine and turned it into electronic cash, right?" Randy says.

"So you claimed. I haven't actually spentany of that electronic cash yet," says Doug.

"We want to do the same thing for the Church--or Wing--or whoever ends up in possession of the gold. We want to deposit it in the Crypt, and make it usable as electronic currency."

Amy asks, "Do you understand that, in order to move the gold out of here, it'll be necessary to travel across land controlled by Wing?"

"Who says we have to move it?"

Silence for a minute, or what passes for silence in a jungle.

Doug Shaftoe says, "You're right. If the stories are even half true, this facility is far more secure than any bank vault."

"The stories are all true--and then some," Randy says. "The man who designed and built Golgotha is Goto Dengo himself."

"Shit!"

"He drew plans of it for us. And the larger issue of local and national security is not a problem here," Randy adds. "Of course the government has sometimes been unstable. But any invader who wants to physically seize possession of the gold will have to fight his way across this jungle with tens of millions of heavily armed Filipinos barring his path."

"Everyone knows what the Huks did against the Nips," Doug says, nodding vigorously. "Or the VC against us, for that matter. No one would be stupid enough to try it."

"Especially if we put you in charge, Doug."

Amy's been woolgathering through most of the conversation, but at this she turns and grins at her father.

"I accept," Doug says.

Randy's slowly becoming aware that most of the birds and bugs who live here move so fast that you can't even turn your head fast enough to center them in your vision. They exist only as slicing movements in your peripheral vision. The only exception would seem to be a species of gnat that has evolved into the specific niche of plunging into the left eyeballs of human beings at something just under the speed of sound. Randy has taken about four hits in the left eye, none in the right. He takes another one now, and as he's recovering from it, the earth jumps underneath them. It is a little like an earthquake in its psychological effect: a feeling of disbelief, and then betrayal, that the solid ground is having the temerity to move around. But it's all over by the time the sensation has moved up their spines to their brains. The river's still running, and the dragonfly is still hunting.

"That felt exactly like high explosive going off," says Doug Shaftoe, "but I didn't hear anything. Did anyone hear anything?"

No one heard anything.

"What that means," Doug continues, "is that someone is setting off explosives deep underground."

They start working their way up the riverbed. Randy's GPS indicates that Golgotha is less than two thousand meters upstream. The river begins to develop proper banks that get steadily higher and steeper. John Wayne clambers up onto the left bank and Jackie Woo onto the right, so that the high ground on either side will be guarded, or at least reconnoitered. They pass back into the shade of the canopy. The ground here is some kind of sedimentary rock with granite boulders embedded in it from place to place, like mixed nuts in half-melted chocolate. It must be nothing more than a scab of congealed ash and sediment on top of an underlying monolith of hard rock. Those who are down in the streambed move very slowly now. Part of the time they are down in the river, struggling upstream against a powerful current, and part of the time they are picking their way from boulder to boulder, or sidestepping. along crumbling ledges of harder rock that protrude from the banks here and there. Every few minutes, Doug looks up and makes visual contact with Jackie Woo and John Wayne--who must be contending with challenges of their own, because sometimes they fall behind the main group. The trees only seem to get higher as they work their way up into the mountains, and now their height is accentuated by the fact that they are rooted in the top of a bank that rises above the stream two, five, ten, then twenty and thirty meters. The bank actually overhangs them now: the river's gorge is a tube mostly buried in the earth, open to the sky only through a narrow slot in the top. But it's close to midday and the sun is shining nearly straight down through it, illuminating all of the stuff that makes its way down from the heights. The corpse of a murdered insect drifts down from the upper canopy like winter's first snowflake. Water seeping from the rims of the overhanging bank forms a drip curtain, each drop glittering like a diamond and making it nearly impossible to see the dark cavity behind. Yellow butterflies weave among those falling drops but never get hit.