Cryptonomicon

"For the fucking pig!" Shaftoe clarifies. Then he turns to Private Daniels, who is carrying a featureless bundle, and says, "Open it up!"

The bundle (which was issued by Ethridge to Shaftoe) turns out to contain a black wetsuit. Nothing GI; some kind of European model. Shaftoe unfolds it and examines its various parts while Privates Nathan and Branph dismember Frosty the Pig with vigorous strokes of an enormous bucksaw.

They are all working away silently when a new voice interrupts. "Dear Lord," the voice begins, as they all look up to see a man standing nearby, hands clasped prayerfully. His words, sacramentally condensed into an outward and visible cloud of steam, veil his face. His uniform and rank are obscured by an Army blanket thrown over his shoulders. He'd look like a camel-riding Holy Land prophet if he were not clean-shaven and wearing Rape Prevention Glasses.

"Goddamn it!" Shaftoe says. "I already said a fucking prayer."

"But are we praying for Private Hott, or for ourselves?" the man says. This is a poser. Everything becomes quiet as the meat saw stops moving. Shaftoe drops the wetsuit and stands up. Blanket Man's got very short grizzly hair, or maybe that's frost coalescing on his scalp. His ice colored eyes meet Shaftoe's through the mile-thick lenses of his RPGs, as if he's really expecting an answer. Shaftoe takes a step closer and realizes that the man is wearing a clerical collar.

"You tell me, Rev," Shaftoe says.

Then he recognizes Blanket Man. He's about to let fly with a lusty What in the fuck are you doing here,but something makes him hold back. The chaplain's eyes make a sideways dart so small and so fast that only Shaftoe, who's practically rubbing noses with him, could possibly see it.

The message being: Shut up, Bobby, we'll talk later.

"Private Hott is with God now--or wherever people go after they die," says Enoch "You can call me Brother" Root.

"What kind of an attitude is that!? Course he's with God. Jesus Christ! 'Wherever they go when they die.' What kind of a chaplain are you?"

"I guess I'm a Detachment 2702 kind of chaplain," the chaplain says. Lieutenant Enoch Root finally breaks eye contact with Shaftoe and turns his gaze to where the action is. "As you were, fellows," he says. "Looks like bacon tonight, huh?"

The men chuckle nervously and resume sawing.

Once they get the pig's carcass disentangled from Hott's, each of the Marines grabs a limb. They carry Hott out into the butcher shop, which has been temporarily evacuated for purposes of this operation, so that Hott's former comrades-in-shanks will not spread rumors.

Hasty evacuation of a butcher shop after one of its workers has been found dead on the floor could spawn a few rumors in and of itself. So the cover story du jour, freshly spun by Lieutenant Ethridge, is that Detachment 2702 is (contrary to all outward appearances) an elite, crack medical team concerned that Hott had been struck down by a rare new form of North African food poisoning. Maybe even something deliberately left behind by the French, who are, by accounts, a little irritable about having their battleship sunk. Anyway, the whole shop (the story goes) has to be shut down for the day and gone over with a nit comb. Hott's corpse will be cremated before being sent back to the family, just to make sure that the dreaded affliction does not spread into Chicago--the planetary abbatoir capital--where its incalculable consequences could alter the outcome of the war.

There is a GI coffin laid out on the floor, just to preserve the fiction. Shaftoe and his men ignore it completely and begin dressing the body, first in an appalling pair of swim trunks, then various components of the wetsuit.

"Hey!" Ethridge says. "I thought you were going to do the gloves last."

"Sir, we're doing them first, by your leave, sir!" Bobby Shaftoe says.

"On account of his fingers will thaw out first and once that happens we are screwed, sir!"

"Well, slap this on him first," Ethridge says, and hands over a wrist watch. Shaftoe hefts it and whistles. It's a beaut: a Swiss chronometer in solid uranium, its jewel-laden movement throbbing away like the heart beat of a small mammal. He swings it on the end of its wristband, made in cunningly joined armor plates. It is heavy enough to stun a muskellunge.

"Nice," Shaftoe says, "but it doesn't tell time too good."

"In the time zone where we are going," Ethridge says, "it does."