Cryptonomicon

Shaftoe has gotten himself into a bit of a hole, and cannot see forward or back without exposing himself. He cannot see his fellow Marines, only hear some of them screaming.

He risks a peek at the machine gun nest. It is well concealed by jungle vegetation, but it is evidently built into a cave a good twenty feet above the mudflat. He's not that far from the base of the cliff--he might just reach it with another sprint. But climbing up there is going to be murder. The machine gun probably can't depress far enough to shoot down at him, but they can roll grenades at him until the cows come home, or just pick him off with small arms as he gropes for handholds.

It is, in other words, grenade launcher time. Shaftoe rolls onto his back, extracts a flanged metal tube from his web gear, fits it onto the muzzle of his ought-three. He tries to clamp it down, but his fingers slip on the bloody wing nut. Who's the pencil-neck that decided to use a fucking wing-nutin this context? No point griping about it here and now. There is actually blood all over the place, but he is not in pain. He drags his fingers through the sand, gets them all gritty, tightens that wing nut down.

Out of its handy pouch comes one Mark II fragmentation grenade, a.k.a. pineapple, and with a bit more groping he's got the Grenade Projection Adapter, M1. He engages the former into the latter, yanks out the safety pin, drops it, then slips the fully prepped and armed Grenade Projection Adapter, Ml, with its fruity payload, over the tube of the grenade launcher. Finally: he opens up one specially marked cartridge case, fumbles through bent and ruptured Lucky Strikes, finds one brass cylinder, a round of ammunition sans payload, crimped at the end but not endowed with an actual bullet. Loads same into the Springfield's firing chamber.

He creeps along the log so that he can pop up and fire from an unexpected location and perhaps not get his head chewed off by the machine gun. Finally raises this Rube Goldberg device that his Springfield has become, jams the butt into the sand (in grenade-launcher mode the recoil will break your collarbone), points it toward the foe, pulls the trigger. Grenade Projection Adapter, M1 is gonewith a terrible pow,trailing a damn hardware store of now-superfluous parts, like a soul discarding its corpse. The pineapple is now soaring heavenward, even its pin and safety lever gone, its chemical fuse aflame so that it even has a, whattayoucallit, an inner light. Shaftoe's aim is true, and the grenade is heading where intended. He thinks he's pretty damn smart--until the grenade bounces back, tumbles down the cliff, and blows up another rotten log. The Nips have anticipated Bobby Shaftoe's little plan, and put up nets or chicken wire or something.

He lies on his back in the mud, looking up at the sky, saying the word "fuck" over and over. The entire log throbs, and something akin to peat moss showers down into his face as the bullets chew up the rotten wood. Bobby Shaftoe says a prayer to the Almighty and prepares to mount a banzai charge.

Then the maddening sound of the machine gun stops, and is replaced by the sound of a man screaming. His voice sounds unfamiliar. Shaftoe levers himself up on his elbow and realizes that the screaming is coming from the direction of the cave.

He looks up into the big, sky-blue eyes of Enoch Root.

The chaplain has moved from his nook at the back of the plane and is squatting next to one of the little windows, holding onto whatever he can. Bobby Shaftoe, who has rolled uncomfortably onto his stomach, looks out a window on the opposite side of the plane. He ought to see the sky, but instead he sees a sand dune wheeling past. The sight makes him instantly nauseated. He does not even consider sitting up.

Brilliant spots of light are streaking wildly around the inside of the plane, like ball lightning, but--and this is far from obvious at first--they are actually projected against the wall of the plane, like flashlight beams. He back-traces the beams, taking advantage of a light haze of vaporized hydraulic fluid that has begun to accumulate in the air; and finds that they originate in a series of small circular holes that some asshole has punched through the skin of the plane while he was sleeping. The sun is shining through these holes, always in the same direction of course; but the plane is going every which way.

He realizes that he has actually been lying on the ceiling of the airplane ever since he woke up, which explains why he was on his stomach. When this dawns on him, he vomits.

The bright spots all vanish. Very, very reluctantly, Shaftoe risks a glance out the window and sees only greyness.

He thinks he is on the floor now. He is next to the corpse, at any rate, and the corpse was strapped down.

He lies there for several minutes, just breathing and thinking. Air whistles through the holes in the fuselage, loud enough to split his head.