Cryptonomicon

There is no fixed boundary between the water of Manila Bay and the humid air above it, only a featureless blue-grey shroud hanging a couple of miles away. Glory IVmaneuvers cautiously through an immense strewing of anchored cargo ships for about half an hour, then picks up speed and heads out into the center of the bay. The air thins a bit, allowing Randy a good view of Bata'an off to starboard: black mountains mostly veiled in haze and speckled by the mushroom-cap-shaped clouds of ascending thermals. For the most part, it has no beaches, just red cliffs plummeting the last few yards into the sea. But as they work their way out to the end of the peninsula, the land tails off more gently and supports a few pale green fields. At the very tip of Bata'an are a couple of stabbing limestone crags that Randy recognizes from Avi's video. But by this point he has eyes mostly for Corregidor itself, which lies a few miles off the end of the peninsula.

America Shaftoe, or Amy as she likes to be called, spends most of the voyage bustling around on the deck, engaging the Filipino and American divers in bursts of serious conversation, sometimes sitting cross-legged on the deck plates to go over papers or charts. She has donned a frayed straw cowboy hat to protect her head from solar radiation. Randy's in no hurry to expose himself. He ambles around the air-conditioned cabin, sipping his coffee and looking at the photographs on the walls.

He is naively expecting to see pictures of divers landing submarine cables on beaches. Semper Marine Services does a fair amount of cable work--and does it well, he checked their references before hiring them--but they apparently do not consider that kind of work interesting enough to photograph. Most of these pictures are of undersea salvage operations: divers, with enormous grins on their leathery faces, triumphantly holding up barnacle-encrusted vases, like hockey players brandishing the Stanley Cup.

From a distance, Corregidor is a lens of jungle bulging out of the water with a flat shelf extending off to one side. From the maps, he knows that it is really a sperm-shaped affair. What looks like a shelf from this angle is its tail, which snakes off to the east as if the sperm were trying to swim out of Manila Bay to impregnate Asia.

Amy storms past and throws the cabin door open. "Come to the bridge," she says, "you should see this."

Randy follow's her. "Who's the guy in most of those pictures?" he asks.

"Scary, crew cut?"

"Yeah."

"That's my father," she says. "Doug."

"Would that be Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe?" Randy asks. He's seen the name on some of the documents that he's exchanged with Semper Marine.

"The same."

"The ex-SEAL?"

"Yeah. But he doesn't like to be referred to that way. It is sucha cliche."

"Why does he seem familiar to me?"

Amy sighs. "He had his fifteen minutes of fame back in 1975."

''I'm having trouble remembering."

"You know Comstock?"

"Attorney General Paul Comstock? Hates crypto?"

"I'm talking about his father. Earl Comstock."

"Cold War policy guy--the brains behind the Vietnam War--right?"

"I've never heard him described that way, but yeah, we're talking about the same guy. You might remember that back in 1975, Earl Comstock fell, or was pushed, off a ski lift in Colorado, and broke his arms."

"Oh, yeah. It's sort of coming back to me.

"My pop--" Amy does a little head-fake towards one of the photographs "--happened to be seated right next to him at the time."

"By accident, or--"

"Total chance. Not planned."

"That's one way to look at it," Randy says, "but on the other hand, if Earl Comstock went skiing frequently, the probability was actually rather high that sooner or laterhe'd find himself sitting, fifty feet off the ground, next to a Vietnam combat veteran."

"Whatever. All I'm saying is--I don't want to talk about it, actually."

"Am I going to get to meet this character?" Randy asks, looking at the photograph.

Amy bites her lip and squints at the horizon. "Ninety percent of the time his presence is a sign that something really weird is going on." She opens the hatch to the bridge and holds it for him, pointing out the high step.

"The other ten percent?"

"He's bored, or on the outs with his girlfriend."