Cryptonomicon

It is early in November of 1942 and a simply unbelievable amount of shit is going on, all at once, everywhere. Zeus himself would not be able to sort it all out, not even if he mobilized the caryatids--tell them never mind what we told you, just drop those loads. Temples collapsing everywhere, like spyglasses, he'd send those caryatids--and any naiads and dryads he could scare up--to library school, issue them green visors, dress them in the prim asexual uniforms of the OPAMS, the Olympian Perspective Archive Management Service, put them to work filling out three-by-five cards round the clock. Get them to use some of that vaunted caryatid steadfastness to tend Hollerith machines and ETC card readers. Even then, Zeus would probably still lack a handle on the situation. He'd be so pissed off he would hardly know which hubristical mortals to fling his thunderbolts at, nor which pinup girls and buck privates to molest.

Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is as Olympian as anyone right now. Roosevelt and Churchill and the few others on the Ultra Mega list have the same access, but they have other cares and distractions. They can't wander around the data flow capital of the planet, snooping over translators' shoulders and reading the decrypts as they come, chunkity-chunkity whirr,out of the Typex machines. They cannot trace individual threads of the global narrative at their whim, running from hut to hut patching connections together, even as the WRENs in Hut 11 string patch cables from one bombe socket to another, fashioning a web to catch Hitler's messages as they speed through the ether.

Here are some of the things Waterhouse knows: the Battle of El Alamein is won, and Montgomery is chasing Rommel westwards across Cyrenaica at what looks like a breakneck pace, driving him back toward the distant Axis stronghold of Tunis. But it's not the rout it appears to be. If Monty would only grasp the significance of the intelligence coming through the Ultra channel, he would be able to move decisively, to surround and capture large pockets of Germans and Italians. But he never does, and so Rommel stages an orderly retreat, preparing to fight another day, and plodding Monty is roundly cursed in the watch rooms of Bletchley Park for his failure to exploit their priceless but perishable gems of intelligence.

The largest sealift in history just piled into Northwest Africa. It is called Operation Torch, and it's going to take Rommel from behind, serving as anvil to Montgomery's hammer, or, if Monty doesn't pick up the pace a bit, maybe the other way around. It looks brilliantly organized but it's not really; this is the first time America has punched across the Atlantic in any serious way and so a whole grab bag of stuff is included on those ships--including any number of signals intelligence geeks who are storming theatrically onto the beaches as if they were Marines. Also included in the landing is the American contingent of Detachment 2702--a hand-picked wrecking crew of combat-hardened leathernecks.

Some of these Marines learned what they know on Guadalcanal, a basically useless island in the Southwest Pacific where the Empire of Nippon and the United States of America are disputing--with rifles--each other's right to build a military airbase. Early returns suggest that the Nipponese Army, during its extended tour of East Asia, has lost its edge. It would appear that raping the entire female population of Nanjing, and bayoneting helpless Filipino villagers, does not translate into actual military competence. The Nipponese Army is still trying to work out some way to kill, say, a hundred American Marines without losing, say, five hundred of its own soldiers.

The Japanese Navy is a different story--they know what they are doing. They have Yamamoto. They have torpedoes that actually explode when they strike their targets, in stark contrast to the American models which do nothing but scratch the paint of the Japanese ships and then sink apologetically. Yamamoto just made another attempt to wipe out the American fleet off the Santa Cruz Islands, sank Hornetand blew a nice hole in Enterprise.But he lost a third of his planes. Watching the Japanese rack up losses, Waterhouse wonders if anyone in Tokyo has bothered to break out the abacus and run the numbers on this Second World War thing.