ical than not. In each case, a
belligerent Power has developed a machine cypher which it considers to be
perfectly unbreakable. In each case, an allied Power has in fact broken that
cypher. In America, Dr. Schoen and his team broke Indigo and devised the
Magic machine. Here, it was Dr. Knox's team that broke Enigma and devised
the Bombe. The leading light here seems to have been Dr. Turing. The leading
light with you chaps was Dr. Schoen, who is, as you said, under the weather.
But he holds you up as comparable to Turing, Commander Waterhouse."
"That's pretty darn generous," Waterhouse says.
"But you studied with Turing at Princeton, did you not?"
"We were there at the same time, if that's what you mean. We rode
bikes. His work was a lot more advanced."
"But Turing was pursuing graduate studies. You were merely an
undergraduate."
"Sure. But even allowing for that, he's way smarter than me."
"You are too modest, Captain Waterhouse. How many undergraduates have
published papers in international journals?"
"We just rode bikes," Waterhouse insists. "Einstein wouldn't give me
the time of day."
"Dr. Turing has shown himself to be rather handy with information
theory," says a prematurely haggard guy with long limp grey hair, whom
Waterhouse now pegs as some sort of Oxbridge don. "You must have discussed
this with him.
The don turns to the others and says, donnishly, "Information Theory
would inform a mechanical calculator in much the same way as, say, fluid
dynamics would inform the hull of a ship." Then he turns back to Waterhouse
and says, somewhat less formally: "Dr. Turing has continued to develop his
work on the subject since he vanished, from your point of view, into the
realm of the Classified. Of particular interest has been the subject of just
how much information can be extracted from seemingly random data."
Suddenly all of the other people in the room are exchanging those
amused looks again. "I gather from your reaction," says the Main Guy, "that
this has been of continuing interest to you as well."
Waterhouse wonders what his reaction was. Did he grow fangs? Drool into
his coffee?
"That's good," says the Main Guy before Waterhouse can answer, "because
it is of the highest interest to us as well. You see, now that we are making
efforts and I must emphasize the preliminary and unsatisfactory level of
these efforts to this point to coordinate intelligence between America and
Britain, we find ourselves in the oddest situation that has ever faced a
pair of allies in a war. We know everything, Commander Waterhouse. We
receive Hitler's personal communications to his theater commanders,
frequently before the commanders do! This knowledge is obviously a powerful
tool. But just as obviously, it cannot help us win the war unless we allow
it to change our actions. That is, if, through Ultra, we become aware of a
convoy sailing from Taranto to supply Rommel in North Africa, the knowledge
does us no good unless we go out and sink that convoy."
"Clearly," Waterhouse says.
"Now, if ten convoys are sent out and all of them are sunk, even those
under cover of clouds and darkness, the Germans will ask themselves how we
knew where those convoys could be found. They will realize that we have
penetrated the Enigma cypher, and change it, and then this tool will be lost
to us. It is safe to say that Mr. Churchill will be displeased by such an
outcome." The Main Guy looks at all of the others, who nod knowingly.
Waterhouse gets the feeling that Mr. Churchill has been bearing down rather
hard on this particular point.
"Let us recast this in information theory terms," says the don.
"Information flows from Germany to us, through the Ultra system at Bletchley
Park. That information comes to us as seemingly random Morse code
transmissions on the wireless. But because we have very bright people who
can discover order in what is seemingly random, we can extract information
that is crucial to our endeavors. Now, the Germans have not broken our
important cyphers. But they can observe our actions the routing of our
convoys in the North Atlantic, the deployment of our air forces. If the
convoys always avoid the U boats, if the air forces always go straight to
the German convoys, then it is clear to the Germans I'm speaking of a very
bright sort of German here, a German of the professor type that there is not
randomness here. This German can find correlations. He can see that we know
more than we should. In other words, there is a certain point at which
information begins to flow from us back to the Germans."
"We need to know where that point is," says the Main Guy. "Exactly
where it is. We need then to stay on the right side of it. To develop the
appearance of randomness."
"Yes," Waterhouse says, "and it has to be a kind of randomness that
would convince someone like Rudolf von Hacklheber."
"Exactly the fellow we had in mind," the don says. "Dr. von Hacklheber,
as of last year."
"Oh!" Waterhouse says. "Rudy got his Ph.D.?" Since Rudy got called back
into the embrace of the Thousand Year Reich, Waterhouse has assumed the
worst: imagining him out there in a greatcoat, sleeping in drifts and
besieging Leningrad or something. But apparently the Nazis, with their sharp
eye for talent (as long as it isn't Jewish talent) have given him a desk
job.
Still, it's touch and go for a while after Waterhouse shows pleasure
that Rudy's okay. One of the Other Guys, trying to break the ice, jokes that
if someone had had the foresight to lock Rudy up in New Jersey for the
duration, there would be no need for the new category of secret known as
Ultra Mega. No one seems to think it's funny, so Waterhouse assumes it's
true.
They show him the organizational chart for RAE Special Detachment No.
2701, which contains the names of all of the twenty four people in the world
who are on to Ultra Mega. The top is cluttered with names such as Winston
Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Then come some other names that
seem oddly familiar to Waterhouse perhaps the names of these very gents here
in this room. Below them, one Chattan, a youngish RAF colonel who
(Waterhouse is assured) accomplished some very fine things during the Battle
of Britain.
In the next rank of the chart is the name Lawrence Pritchard
Waterhouse. There are two other names: one is an RAF captain and the other
is a captain in the United States Marine Corps. There is also a dotted line
veering off to one side, leading to the name Dr. Alan Mathison Turing. Taken
as a whole, this chart may be the most irregular and bizarre ad hocracy ever
grafted onto a military organization.
In the bottom row of the chart are two groups of half a dozen names,
clustered beneath the names of the RAF captain and the Marine captain
respectively. These are the squads that represent the executive wing of the
organization: as one of the guys at the Broadway Building puts it, "the men
at the coal face," and as the one American Guy translates it for him, "this
is where the rubber meets the road."
"Do you have any questions?" the Main Guy asks.
"Did Alan choose the number?"
"You mean Dr. Turing?"
"Yes. Did he choose the number 2701?"
This level of detail is clearly several ranks beneath the station of
the men in the Broadway Buildings. They look startled and almost offended,
as if Waterhouse has suddenly asked them to take dictation.
"Possibly," says the Main Guy. "Why do you ask?"
"Because," Waterhouse says, "the number 2701 is the product of two
primes, and those numbers, 37 and 73, when expressed in decimal notation,
are, as you can plainly see, the reverse of each other."
All heads swivel toward the don, who looks put out. "We'd best change
that," he says, "it is the sort of thing that Dr. von Hacklheber would
notice." He stands up, withdraws a Mont Blanc fountain pen from his pocket,
and amends the organizational chart so that it reads 2702 instead of 2701.
As he is doing this, Waterhouse looks at the other men in the room and
thinks that they look satisfied. Clearly, this is just the sort of parlor
trick they have hired Waterhouse to perform.
Chapter 13 CORREGIDOR
There is no fixed boundary between the water of Manila Bay and the
humid air above it, only a featureless blue grey shroud hanging a couple of
miles away. Glory IV maneuvers cautiously through an immense strewing of
anchored cargo ships for about half an hour, then picks up speed and heads
out into the center of the bay. The air thins a bit, allowing Randy a good
view of Bata'an off to starboard: black mountains mostly veiled in haze and
speckled by the mushroom cap shaped clouds of ascending thermals. For the
most part, it has no beaches, just red cliffs plummeting the last few yards
into the sea. But as they work their way out to the end of the peninsula,
the land tails off more gently and supports a few pale green fields. At the
very tip of Bata'an are a couple of stabbing limestone crags that Randy
recognizes from Avi's video. But by this point he has eyes mostly for
Corregidor itself, which lies a few miles off the end of the peninsula.
America Shaftoe, or Amy as she likes to be called, spends most of the
voyage bustling around on the deck, engaging the Filipino and American
divers in bursts of serious conversation, sometimes sitting cross legged on
the deck plates to go over papers or charts. She has donned a frayed straw
cowboy hat to protect her head from solar radiation. Randy's in no hurry to
expose himself. He ambles around the air conditioned cabin, sipping his
coffee and looking at the photographs on the walls.
He is naively expecting to see pictures of divers landing submarine
cables on beaches. Semper Marine Services does a fair amount of cable work
and does it well, he checked their references before hiring them but they
apparently do not consider that kind of work interesting enough to
photograph. Most of these pictures are of undersea salvage operations:
divers, with enormous grins on their leathery faces, triumphantly holding up
barnacle encrusted vases, like hockey players brandishing the Stanley Cup.
From a distance, Corregidor is a lens of jungle bulging out of the
water with a flat shelf extending off to one side. From the maps, he knows
that it is really a sperm shaped affair. What looks like a shelf from this
angle is its tail, which snakes off to the east as if the sperm were trying
to swim out of Manila Bay to impregnate Asia.
Amy storms past and throws the cabin door open. "Come to the bridge,"
she says, "you should see this."
Randy follow's her. "Who's the guy in most of those pictures?" he asks.
"Scary, crew cut?"
"Yeah."
"That's my father," she says. "Doug."
"Would that be Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe?" Randy asks. He's seen the
name on some of the documents that he's exchanged with Semper Marine.
"The same."
"The ex SEAL?"
"Yeah. But he doesn't like to be referred to that way. It is such a
cliche."
"Why does he seem familiar to me?"
Amy sighs. "He had his fifteen minutes of fame back in 1975."
''I'm having trouble remembering."
"You know Comstock?"
"Attorney General Paul Comstock? Hates crypto?"
"I'm talking about his father. Earl Comstock."
"Cold War policy guy the brains behind the Vietnam War right?"
"I've never heard him described that way, but yeah, we're talking about
the same guy. You might remember that back in 1975, Earl Comstock fell, or
was pushed, off a ski lift in Colorado, and broke his arms."
"Oh, yeah. It's sort of coming back to me.
"My pop " Amy does a little head fake towards one of the photographs "
happened to be seated right next to him at the time."
"By accident, or "
"Total chance. Not planned."
"That's one way to look at it," Randy says, "but on the other hand, if
Earl Comstock went skiing frequently, the probability was actually rather
high that sooner or later he'd find himself sitting, fifty feet off the
ground, next to a Vietnam combat veteran."
"Whatever. All I'm saying is I don't want to talk about it, actually."
"Am I going to get to meet this character?" Randy asks, looking at the
photograph.
Amy bites her lip and squints at the horizon. "Ninety percent of the
time his presence is a sign that something really weird is going on." She
opens the hatch to the bridge and holds it for him, pointing out the high
step.
"The other ten percent?"
"He's bored, or on the outs with his girlfriend."
Glory's pilot 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.
Randy tears himself away from the microwave antenna, of which he is
part owner, and looks in the direction Amy's pointing. The limestock flank
of the island, which drops vertically the last few meters into the water, is
riddled with holes.
"Yeah."
"Built by Americans to house beach defense guns. Enlarged by the
Japanese as launch sites for suicide boats."
"Wow."
Randy notices a deep gargling noise, and looks over to see that a boat
has fallen in alongside them. It is a canoe shaped affair maybe forty feet
long, with long outriggers on either side. A couple of ragged flags fly from
a short mast, and bright laundry flaps gaily from various lines strung here
and there. A big, naked diesel engine sits in the middle of the hull
flailing the atmosphere with black smoke. Forward of that, several
Filipinos, including women and children, are gathered in the shade of a
bright blue tarpaulin, eating. Aft, a couple of men are fiddling with diving
equipment. One of them is holding something up to his mouth: a microphone. A
voice blares from Glory's radio, speaking Tagalog. Ernesto stifles a laugh,
picks up the mike, and answers briefly. Randy doesn't know what they are
saying, but he suspects it is something like "Let's horse around later, our
client is on the bridge right now."
"Business associates," Amy explains dryly. Her body language says that
she wants to get away from Randy and back to work.
"Thanks for the tour," Randy says. "One question."
Amy raises her eyebrows, trying to look patient.
"How much of Semper Marine's revenue derives from treasure hunting?"
"This month? This year? The last ten years? Over the lifetime of the
company?" Amy says.
"Whatever."
"That kind of income is sporadic," Amy says. "Glory was paid for, and
then some, by pottery that we recovered from a junk. But some years we get
all of our revenue from jobs like this one."
"In other words, boring jobs that suck?" Randy says. He just blurts it
out. Normally he controls his tongue a little better. But shaving off his
beard has blurred his ego boundaries, or something.
He's expecting her to laugh or at least wink a him, but she takes it
very seriously. She has a pretty good poker face. "Think of it as making
license plates," she says.
"So you guys are basically a bunch of treasure hunters," Randy says.
"You just make license plates to stabilize your cash flow."
"Call us treasure hunters if you like," Amy says. "Why are you in
business, Randy?" She turns around and stalks out of the place.
Randy's still watching her go when he hears Ernesto cursing under his
breath, not so much angry as astonished. Glory is swinging around the tip of
Corregidor's tail now and the entire southern side of the island is becoming
visible for the first time. The last mile or so of the tail curves around to
form a semicircular bay. Anchored in the center of this bay is a white ship
that Randy identifies, at first, as a small ocean liner with rakish and
wicked lines. Then he sees the name painted on its stern: RUI FALEIRO SANTA
MONICA, CALIFORNIA
Randy goes and stands next to Ernesto and they stare at the white ship
for a while. Randy has heard about it, and Ernesto, like everyone else in
the Philippines, knows about it. But seeing it is another thing entirely. A
helicopter sits on its afterdeck like a toy. A dagger shaped muscle boat
hangs from a davit, ready for use as a dinghy. A brown skinned man in a
gleaming white uniform can be seen polishing a brass rail.
"Rui Faleiro was Magellan's cosmographer," Randy says.
"Cosmographer?"
"The brains of the operation," Randy says, tapping his head.
"He came here with Magellan?" Ernesto asks.
In most of the world, Magellan is thought of as the first guy who went
around the world. Here, everyone knows he only made it as far as Mactan
Island, where he was killed by Filipinos.
"When Magellan set out on his ship, Faleiro stayed behind in Seville,"
Randy says. "He went crazy."
"You know a lot about Magallanes, eh?" Ernesto says. "No," Randy says,
"I know a lot about the Dentist."
***
"Don't talk to the Dentist. Ever. Not about anything. Not even tech
stuff. Any technical question he asks you is just a stalking horse for some
business tactic that is as far beyond your comprehension as Gödel's Proof
would be to Daffy Duck."
Avi told Randy this spontaneously one evening, as they were tucking
into dinner at a restaurant in downtown Makati. Avi refuses to discuss
anything important within a mile of the Manila Hotel because he thinks every
room, and every table, is under surveillance.
"Thanks for the vote of confidence," Randy said.
"Hey," Avi said, "I'm just trying to stake out my turf here justify my
existence in this project. I'll handle the business stuff."
"You're not being a little paranoid?"
"Listen. The Dentist has at least a billion dollars of his own, and
another ten billion under management half the fucking orthodontists in
Southern California retired at age forty because he dectupled their IRAs in
the space of two or three years. You don't achieve those kinds of results by
being a nice guy."
"Maybe he just got lucky."
"He did get lucky. But that doesn't mean he's a nice guy. My point is
that he put that money into investments that were extremely risky. He played
Russian roulette with his investors' life savings, keeping them in the dark.
I mean, this guy would invest in a Mindanao kidnapping ring if it gave a
good rate of return."
"Does he understand that he was lucky, I wonder?"
"That's my question. I'm guessing no. I think he considers himself to
be an instrument of Divine Providence, like Douglas MacArthur."
***
Rui Faleiro is the pride of Seattle's superyacht industry, which has
been burgeoning, ever so discreetly, of late. Randy gleaned a few facts
about it from a marketing brochure that was published before the Dentist
actually bought the ship. So he knows that the helicopter and the speedboat
came included in the purchase price, which has never been divulged. The
vessel contains, among other things, ten tons of marble. The master bedroom
suite contains full his and hers bathrooms lined with black marble and pink
marble respectively, so that the Dentist and the Diva don't have to fight
over sink space when they are primping for a big event in the yacht's grand
ballroom.
"The Dentist?" Ernesto says.
"Kepler. Doctor Kepler," Randy says. "In the States, some people call
him the Dentist." People in the high tech industry.
Ernesto nods knowingly. "A man like that could have had any woman in
the world," he says. "But he picked a Filipina."
"Yes," Randy says cautiously.
"In the States, do people know the story of Victoria Vigo?"
"I must tell you that she is not as famous in the States as she is
here."
"Of course."
"But some of her songs were very popular. Many people know that she
came from great poverty."
"Do people in the States know about Smoky Mountain? The garbage dump in
Tondo, where children hunt for food?"
"Some of them do. It will be very famous when the movie about Victoria
Vigo's life shows on television."
Ernesto nods, seemingly satisfied. Everyone here knows that a movie
about the Diva's life is being made, starring herself. They generally don't
know that it's a vanity project, financed by the Dentist, and that it will
be aired only on cable television in the middle of the night.
But they probably know that it will leave out all the good parts.
***
"As far as the Dentist is concerned," Avi said, "our advantage is that,
when it comes to the Philippines, he will be predictable. Tame. Even
docile." He smiles cryptically.
"How so?"
"Victoria Vigo whored her way up out of Smoky Mountain, right?"
"Well, there seems to be a lot of nudging and winking to that effect,
but I've never heard anyone come out and say it before," Randy said,
glancing around nervously.
"Believe me, it's the only way she could have gotten out of there.
Pimping arrangements were handled by the Bolobolos. This is a group from
Northern Luzon that was brought into power along with Marcos. They run that
part of town police, organized crime, local politics, you name it.
Consequently, they own her they have photographs, videos from the days when
she was an underage prostitute and porn film starlet."
Randy shook his head in disgust and amazement. "How the hell do you get
this information?"
"Never mind. Believe me, in some circles it's as well known as the
value of pi."
"Not my circles."
"Anyway, the point is that her interests are aligned with the Bolobolos
and always will be. And the Dentist is always going to obediently do
whatever his wife tells him to."
"Can you really assume that?" Randy said. "He's a tough guy. He
probably has a lot more money and power than the Bolobolos. He can do
whatever he wants."
"But he won't," Avi says, smiling that little smile again. "He'll do
what his wife tells him to.
"How do you know that?"
"Look," Avi said, "Kepler is a major control freak just like most
powerful, rich men. Right?"
"Right."
"If you are that much of a control freak, what sexual preferences does
that translate into?"
"I hope I'll never know. I suppose you would want to dominate a woman.
"Wrong!" Avi said. "Sex is more complicated than that, Randy. Sex is a
place where people's repressed desires come out. People get most turned on
when their innermost secrets are revealed "
"Shit! Kepler's a masochist?"
"He is such a fucking masochist that he was famous for it. At least in
the Southeast Asian sex industry. Pimps and Madams in Hong Kong, Bangkok,
Shenzhen, Manila, they all had files on him they knew exactly what he
wanted. And that's how he met Victoria Vigo. He was in Manila, see, working
on the FiliTel deal. Spent a lot of time here, staying in a hotel that's
owned, and bugged, by the Bolobolos. They studied his mating habits like
entomologists watching the reproductive habits of ants. They groomed
Victoria Vigo their ace, their bombshell, their sexual Terminator to give
Kepler exactly what Kepler wanted. Then they sent her into his life like a
guided fucking missile and pow! true love."
"You'd think he would have been suspicious, or something. I'm surprised
he'd get that involved with a whore."
"He didn't know she was a whore! That's the beauty of the plan! The
Bolobolos set her up with a fake identity as a concierge at Kepler's hotel!
A demure Catholic school girl! It starts with her getting him tickets to a
play, and inside of a year. he's chained to his bed on that fucking mega
yacht of his with strap marks on his ass, and she's standing over him with a
wedding ring on her finger the size of a headlamp, the hundred and thirty
eighth richest woman in the world."
"Hundred and twenty fifth," Randy corrected him, "FiliTel stock has
been on a bull run lately."
***
Randy spends the next days trying not to run into the Dentist. He stays
at a small private inn up on the top of the island, eating continental
breakfast every morning with an assortment of American and Nipponese war
veterans who have come here with their wives to (Randy supposes) deal with
emotional issues a million times more profound than anything Randy's ever
had to contend with. The Rui Faleiro is nothing if not conspicuous, and
Randy can get a pretty good idea of whether the Dentist is aboard it by
watching the movements of the helicopter and the speedboat.
When he thinks it's safe, he goes down to the beach below the microwave
antenna and watches Amy's divers work on the cable installation. Some of
them are working out in the surf zone, bolting sections of cast iron pipe
around the cable. Some are working a couple of miles offshore coordinating
with a barge that is injecting the cable directly into the muddy seafloor
with a giant, cleaver like appendage.
The shore end of the cable runs into a new reinforced concrete building
set back about a hundred meters from the high tide level. It is basically
just a big room filled with batteries, generators, air conditioning units,
and racks of electronic equipment. The software running on that equipment is
Randy's responsibility, and so he spends most of his time in that building,
staring into a computer screen and typing. From there, transmission lines
run up the hill to the microwave tower.
The other end is being extended out towards a buoy that is bobbing in
the South China Sea a few kilometers away. Attached to that buoy is the end
of the North Luzon Coastal Festoon, a cable, owned by FiliTel, that runs up
the coast of the island. If you follow it far enough you reach a building at
the northern tip of the island, where a big cable from Taiwan comes in.
Taiwan, in turn, is heavily webbed into the world submarine cable network;
it is easy and cheap to get data into or out of Taiwan.
There is only one gap left in the private chain of transmission that
Epiphyte and FiliTel are trying to establish from Taiwan to downtown Manila,
and that gap gets narrower by the day, as the cable barge grinds its way
towards the buoy.
***
When it finally gets there, Rui Faleiro weighs anchor and glides out to
meet it. The helicopter and the speedboat, and a flotilla of hired boats, go
into action ferrying dignitaries and media crews out from Manila. Avi shows
up carrying two fresh tuxedos from a tailor shop in Shanghai ("All those
famous Hong Kong tailors were refugees from Shanghai"). He and Randy tear
off the tissue paper, put them on, and then ride in an un air conditioned
jeepney down the hill to the dock, where Glory awaits them.
Two hours later, Randy gets to lay eyes on the Dentist and the Diva for
the first time ever in the grand ballroom of the Rui Faleiro. To Randy the
party is like any other: he shakes hands with a few people, forgets their
names, finds a place to sit down, and enjoys the wine and the food in
blissful solitude.
The one thing that is special about this party is that two tar covered
cables, each about the thickness of a baseball bat, are running up onto the
quarterdeck. If you go to the rail and look down you can see them disappear
into the brine. The cable ends meet on a tabletop in the middle of the deck,
where a technician, flown in from Hong Kong and duded up in a tuxedo, sits
with a box of tools, working on the splice. He is also working on a big
hangover, but that is fine with Randy since he knows that it's all fake the
cables are just scraps, their loose ends trailing in the water alongside the
yacht. The real splice was performed yesterday and is already lying on the
bottom of the sea with bits running through it.
There is another man on the quarterdeck, mostly staring at Bata'an and
Corregidor but also keeping an eye on Randy. The moment Randy notices him,
this man nods as if checking something off a list in his head, stands up,
walks over, and joins him. He is wearing a very ornate uniform, the U.S.
Navy equivalent of black tie. He is mostly bald, and what hair he does have
is battleship grey, and shorn to a length of perhaps five millimeters. As he
walks toward Randy, several Filipinos watch him with obvious curiosity.
"Randy," he says. Medals clink together as he grips Randy's right hand
and shakes it. He looks to be around fifty, but he has the skin of an eighty
year old Bedouin. He has a lot of ribbons on his chest, and many of them are
red and yellow, which are colors that Randy vaguely associates with Vietnam.
Above his pocket is a little plastic nameplate reading, SHAFTOE. "Don't be
deceived, Randy," says Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe, "I'm not on active duty.
Retired eons ago. But I'm still entitled to wear this uniform. And it's a
hell of a lot easier than going out and trying to find a tuxedo that fits
me."
"Pleased to meet you."
"Pleasure's mine. Where'd you get yours, by the way?"
"My tuxedo?"
"Yeah."
"My partner had it made."
"Your business partner, or your sexual partner?"
"My business partner. At the moment, I am without a sexual partner."
Doug Shaftoe nods impassively. "It is telling that you have not obtained one
in Manila. As our host did, for example."
Randy looks into the ballroom at Victoria Vigo, who, if she were any
more radiant, would cause paint to peel from the walls and windowpanes to
sag like caramel.
"I guess I'm just shy, or something," Randy says.
"Are you too shy to listen to a business proposition?"
"Not at all."
"My daughter asserts that you and our host might lay some more cables
around here in coming years."
"In business, people rarely plan to do a thing only once," Randy says.
"It messes up the spreadsheets."
"You are aware, by now, that the water in this area is shallow."
"Yeah."
"You know that cables cannot be laid in shallow water without extremely
detailed, high resolution sidescan sonar surveys."
"Yes."
"I would like to perform those surveys for you, Randy."
"I see."
"No, I don't think you do see. But I want you to see, and so I'm going
to explain it."
"Okay," Randy says. "Should I bring my partner out?"
"The concept I am about to convey to you is very simple and does not
require two first rate minds in order to process it," Doug Shaftoe says.
"Okay. What is the concept?"
"The detailed survey will be just chock full of new information about
what is on the floor of the ocean in this part of the world. Some of that
information might be valuable. More valuable than you imagine."
"Ah," Randy says. "You mean that it might be the kind of thing that
your company knows how to capitalize on."
"That's right," says Doug Shaftoe. "Now, if you hire one of my
competitors to perform your survey, and they stumble on this kind of
information, they will not tell you about it. They will exploit it
themselves. You will not know that they have found anything and you will not
profit from it. But if you hire Semper Marine Services, I will tell you
about whatever I find, and I will cut you and your company in on a share of
any proceeds."
"Hmmmm," Randy says. He is trying to figure out how to do a poker face,
but he knows that Shaftoe sees right through him.
"On one condition," Doug Shaftoe says.
"I suspected there might be a condition."
"Every hook that's worth a damn has a barb. This is the barb."
"What is it?" Randy asks.
"We keep it a secret from that son of a bitch," Doug Shaftoe says,
jerking his thumb at Hubert Kepler. "Because if the Dentist finds out, then
he and the Bolobolos will just split the entire thing up between them and
we'll see nothing. There's even a chance we would end up dead."
"Well, the being dead part is something that we will certainly have to
think about," Randy says, "but I will convey your proposal to my partner."
Chapter 14 TUBE
Waterhouse and a few dozen strangers are standing and sitting in an
extraordinarily long, narrow room that rocks from side to side. The room is
lined with windows but no light comes into them, only sound: a great deal of
rumbling, rattling, and screeching. Everyone is pensive and silent, as if
they were sitting in church waiting for the service to kick off.
Waterhouse is standing up gripping a ceiling mounted protuberance that
keeps him from being rocked right onto his can. For the last couple of
minutes he has been staring at a nearby poster providing instructions on how
to put on a gas mask. Waterhouse, like everyone else, is carrying one such
device with him in a small dun canvas shoulder bag. Waterhouse's looks
different from everyone else's because it is American and military. It has
drawn a stare or two from the others.
On the poster is a lovely and stylish woman with white skin, and auburn
hair which appears to have been chemically melted and reset into its current
shape at a quality salon. She stands upright, her spine like a flagpole,
chin in the air, elbows bent, hands ritualistically posed: fingers splayed,
thumbs sticking straight up in the air just in front of her face. A sinister
lump dangles between her hands, held in a cat's cradle of khaki strapping.
Her upthrust thumbs are the linchpins of this tidy web.
Waterhouse has been in London for a couple of days now and so he knows
the next part of the story. He would know this pose anywhere. This woman is
poised for the chin thrust. If gas ever falls on the capital, the gas
rattles will sound and the tops of the massive mailboxes, which have all
been treated with special paint, will turn black. Twenty million thumbs will
point into the greenish, poison sky, ten million gas masks will dangle from
them, ten million chins will thrust. He can just imagine the crisp luscious
sound of this woman's soft white skin forcing itself into the confining
black rubber.
Once the chin thrust is complete, all is well. You have to get the
straps neatly arranged atop your auburn permanent and get indoors, but the
worst danger is past. The British gas masks have a squat round fitting on
the front to allow exhalation, which looks exactly like the snout of a pig,
and no woman would be caught dead in such a thing if the models in the gas
mask posters were not such paragons of high caste beauty.
Something catches his eye out in the darkness beyond the window. The
train has reached one of those parts of the Underground where dim gun barrel
colored light sifts down, betraying the stygian secrets of the Tube.
Everyone in the car blinks, glances, and draws breath. The World has
rematerialized around them for a moment. Fragments of wall, encrusted
trusses, bundles of cable hang in space out there, revolving slowly, like
astrono