Cryptonomicon

Shaftoe--role model, leader of men--stifles the impulse to say, Heard of her?I've fuckedher!

"This is the concentrated essence," says Enoch Root.

"How would you know, Rev?" says Private Daniels.

The Rev is not rattled. "I'm the God guy here, right? I know the religious angle?"

"Yes, sir!"

"Well, at one time, there was a group of Muslims called the hashishinwho would eat this stuff and then go out and kill people. They were so good at it, they became famous or infamous. Over time the pronunciation of the name has changed--we know them as assassins."

There is an appropriately respectful silence. Finally, Sergeant Shaftoe says, "What the hell are we waiting for?"

They eat some. Shaftoe, being the highest-ranking enlisted man present, eats more than the others. Nothing happens. "Only person I feel like assassinating is that guy who sold it to us," he says.

***

The airfield, eleven miles out of town, is busier than it was ever intended to be. This is nice grape– and olive-growing land, but stony mountains are visible farther inland, and beyond 'em is a patch of sand the size of the United States--most of which seems to be airborne and headed their way. Countless airplanes--predominantly Dakota transports, a.k.a. Gooney Birds--stir up vast, tongue-coating, booger-nucleating dust clouds. It doesn't occur to Shaftoe for quite some time that his dry eyes and mouth may not be entirely the result of dust in the air. His saliva has the consistency of tile adhesive.

The detachment is so damn secret that no one at the airfield even knows that they exist. There are a lot of Brits here, and in the desert, Brits wear shorts, which makes Shaftoe want to punch them in the nose. He controls the urge. But his obvious hostility towards men in short pants, combined with the fact that he is demanding to be pointed in the direction of a unit that is so secret that he cannot specify it by name or even vaguely describe it, leads to a lot of bafflement, a lot of incredulity, and generally gets the Anglo-American alliance off on the wrong foot.

Sergeant Shaftoe, however, now understands that anything to do with this detachment is liable to be way off to one side, shrouded in black tarps and awnings. Like any other military unit, Detachment 2702 is rich in some supplies and poor in others, but they do appear to control about fifty percent of last year's total U.S. tarpage production. When Shaftoe mentions this fact, and goes on about it to his comrades at great length, some of the men look at him a little funny. It's left to Enoch Root to say, "Between the giant lizards and the black tarps some people might think you were acting a little paranoid."

"Let me tell you about paranoid," Shaftoe says, and he does, not forgetting to mention Lieutenant Ethridge and his wastebaskets. By the time he's had his say, the whole detachment has assembled on the far side of those tarps, and everyone is nice and tense except for their newest recruit, who, as Shaftoe notes approvingly, is beginning to relax. Lying on the bed of the truck in his wetsuit, he adjusts,rather than bounces, when they go over bumps.

Even so, he is still stiff enough to simplify the problem of getting him out of the truck and into their assigned Gooney Bird: a bare-knuckled variant of the DC-3, militarized and (to Shaftoe's skeptical eye) rendered somewhat less than airworthy by a pair of immense cargo doors gouged into one side, nearly cutting the airframe in half. This particular Dakota has been flying around in the fucking desert so long that all the paint's been sand-blasted off its propeller blades, the engine cowling, and the leading edges of the wings, leaving burnished metal that will make an inviting silver gleam for any Luftwaffe pilots within three hundred miles. Worse: diverse antennas sprout from the skin of the fuselage, mostly around the cockpit. Not just whip antennas but great big damn barbecue grills that make Shaftoe wish he had a hacksaw. They are eerily like the ones that Shaftoe humped down the stairway from Station Alpha in Shanghai--a memory that has somehow gotten all mangled together, now, with the other images in his head. When he tries to recollect it, all he can see is a bloodied Jesus carrying a high-frequency dual-band dipole down a stone staircase in Manila, and he knows that can't be right.

Though they are on the precincts of a busy airfield, Ethridge refuses to let this operation go forward when there is as much as a single airplane in the sky. Finally he says, "Okay, NOW!" In the truck, they lift the body up, just in time to hear Ethridge shout, "No, WAIT!" at which point they put him down again. Long after it has stopped being grimly amusing, they put a tarp on Gerald Hott and get him carried on board, and shortly thereafter are airborne. Detachment 2072 is headed for a rendezvous with Rommel.

Chapter 16 CYCLES