Cryptonomicon

Glory'spilot is concentrating intensely and ignores them, which Randy takes to be a sign of professionalism. The bridge has many counters fashioned from doors or thick plywood, and all of the available space is covered with electronic gear: a fax, a smaller machine that spews out weather bulletins, three computers, a satellite phone, a few GSM phones socketed into their chargers, depth-sounding gear. Amy leads him over to a machine with a big screen that is showing what looks like a black-and-white photo of rugged terrain. "Sidescan sonar," she explains, "one of our best tools for this kind of work. Shows us what's on the bottom." She checks one of the computer screens for their current coordinates and then runs a quick calculation in her head. "Ernesto, change course five degrees to starboard please."

"Yes ma'am," Ernesto says, and makes it happen.

"What are you looking for?"

"This is a freebie--like the cigarettes at the hotel," Amy explains. "Just an extra added bonus for doing business with us. Sometimes we like to play tour guide. See? Check that out." She uses her pinkie to point out something that is just becoming visible on the screen. Randy hunches over and peers at it. It is clearly a manmade shape: a jumble of straight lines and right angles.

"Looks like a heap of debris," he says.

"It is now," Amy says, "but it used to be a good chunk of the Filipino treasury."

"What?"

"During the war," Amy says, "after Pearl Harbor, but before the Japanese took Manila, the government emptied out the treasury. They put all the gold and silver into crates and shipped it to Corregidor for safekeeping--supposedly."

"What do you mean, supposedly?"

She shrugs. "This is the Philippines," she says. "I have the feeling a lot of it ended up elsewhere. But a lot of the silver ended up there." She straightens up and nods out the window at Corregidor. "At the time they thought Corregidor was impregnable."

"When was this, roughly?"

"December '41 or January '42. Anyway, it became obvious that Corregidor was going to fall. A submarine came and took away the gold at the beginning of February. Then another sub came and took off guys they couldn't allow to be captured, like codebreakers. But they didn't have enough subs to carry away all the silver. MacArthur left in March. They started taking the silver out, in crates, in the middle of the night, and dropping it into the water."

"You're shitting me!"

"They could always come back later and try to recover it," Amy says. "Better to lose it all than let the Japanese take it, right?"

"I guess so."

"The Japanese recovered a lot of that silver--they captured a bunch of American divers on Bata'an and Corregidor, and made them go down, right down below where we are at this moment, and recover it. But those same divers managed to hide a lot of silver from their guards and get it to Filipinos, who smuggled it into Manila, where it became so common that it totally debased the Japanese occupation currency.

"So what are we seeing right now?"

"The remains of old crates that burst open when they hit the seafloor," Amy says.

"Was there any of that silver left when the war ended?"

"Oh, sure," Amy says breezily. "Most of it was dumped here, and those divers got it, but some was dumped in other areas. My dad recovered some of it as late as the 1970s."

"Wow. That doesn't make any sense!"

"Why not?"

"I can't believe that piles of silver just sat on the bottom of the ocean for thirty years, free for the taking."

"You don't know the Philippines very well," Amy says.

"I know that it's a poor country. Why didn't someone come out and get that silver?"

"Most of the treasure hunters in this part of the world are looking for much bigger game," Amy says, "or easier."

Randy's nonplussed. "A pile of silver on the bottom of the bay seems big and easy to me.

"It's not. Silver's not worth that much. A Sung Dynasty vase, cleaned up, can go for more than its weight in gold. Gold. And it's easier to find the vase--you just scan the seafloor, looking for something shaped like a junk. A sunken junk makes a distinctive image on sonar. Whereas an old crate, all busted up and covered with coral and barnacles, tends to look like a rock."

As they draw closer to Corregidor, Randy can see that the tail of the island is lumpy, with big stacks of rock protruding from it here and there. The color of the land fades gradually from dark jungle green to pale green and then a sere reddish-brown as the tail extends from the fat center of the island out to the end, and the soil becomes dryer. Randy's gaze is fixed on one of those rocky crags, which is surmounted by a new steel tower. Atop the tower is a microwave horn aimed east, toward Epiphyte's building in Intramuros.

"See those caves along the waterline?" Amy says. She seems to regret having mentioned sunken treasure in the first place, and now wants to get off the subject.