reemerges and turns
imperceptibly toward a line of taxis. A driver hurls himself bodily towards
Randy and tears his garment bag loose from his shoulder. "Ministry of
Information," Randy says.
In the long run, it may, or may not, be a good idea for the Sultanate
of Kinakuta to have a gigantic earthquake , volcano , tsunami , and
thermonuclear weapon proof Ministry of Information with a cavernous sub sub
basement crammed with high powered computers and data switches. But the
sultan has decided that it would be sort of cool. He has hired some alarming
Germans to design it, and Goto Engineering to build it. No one, of course,
is more familiar with staggering natural disasters than the Nipponese, with
the possible exception of some peoples who are now extinct and therefore
unable to bid on jobs like this. They also know a thing or two about having
the shit bombed out of them, as do the Germans.
There are subcontractors, of course, and a plethora of consultants.
Through some miraculous feat of fast talking, Avi managed to land one of the
biggest consulting contracts: Epiphyte(2) Corporation is doing "systems
integration" work, which means plugging together a bunch of junk made by
other people, and overseeing the installation of all the computers,
switches, and data lines.
The drive to the site is surprisingly short. Kinakuta City isn't that
big, hemmed in as it is by steep mountain ranges, and the sultan has endowed
it with plenty of eight lane superhighways. The taxi blasts across the plain
of reclaimed land on which the airport is built, swings wide around the
stump of Eliza Peak, ignoring two exits for Technology City, then turns off
at an unmarked exit. Suddenly they are stuck in a queue of empty dump trucks
Nipponese behemoths emblazoned with the word GOTO in fat macho block
letters. Coming towards them is a stream of other trucks that are identical
except that these are fully laden with stony rubble. The taxi driver pulls
onto the right shoulder and zooms past trucks for about half a mile. They're
heading up Randy's ears pop once. This road is built on the floor of a
ravine that climbs up into one of the mountain ranges. Soon they are hemmed
in by vertiginous walls of green, which act like a sponge, trapping an
eternal cloud of mist, through which sparks of brilliant color are sometimes
visible. Randy can't tell whether they are birds or flowers. The contrast
between the cloud forest's lush vegetation and the dirt road, battered by
the house sized tires of the heavy trucks, is disorienting.
The taxi stops. The driver turns and looks at him expectantly. Randy
thinks for a moment that the driver has gotten lost and is looking to Randy
for instructions. The road terminates here, in a parking lot mysteriously
placed in the middle of the cloud forest. Randy sees half a dozen big air
conditioned trailers bearing the logos of various Nipponese, German, and
American firms; a couple of dozen cars; as many buses. All the accoutrements
of a major construction site are here, plus a few extras, like two monkeys
with giant stiff penises fighting over some booty from a Dumpster, but there
is no construction site. Just a wall of green at the end of the road, green
so dark it's almost black.
The empty trucks are disappearing into that darkness. Full ones come
out, their headlights emerging from the mist and gloom first, followed by
the colorful displays that the drivers have built onto the radiator grilles,
followed by the highlights on their chrome and glass, and finally the trucks
themselves. Randy's eyes adjust, and he can see now that he is staring into
a cavern, lit up by mercury vapor lamps.
"You want me to wait?" the driver asks.
Randy glances at the meter, does a quick conversion, and figures out
that the ride to this point has cost him a dime. "Yes," he says, and gets
out of the taxi. Satisfied, the driver kicks back and lights up a cigarette.
Randy stands there and gapes into the cavern for a minute, partly
because it's a hell of a thing to look at and partly because a river of cool
air is draining out of it, which feels good. Then he trudges across the lot
and goes to the trailer marked "Epiphyte."
It is staffed by three tiny Kinakutan women who know exactly who he is,
though they've never met him before, and who give every indication of being
delighted to see him. They wear long, loose wraps of brilliantly colored
fabric on top of Eddie Bauer turtlenecks to ward off the nordic chill of the
air conditioners. They are all fearsomely efficient and poised. Everywhere
Randy goes in Southeast Asia he runs into women who ought to be running
General Motors or something. Before long they have sent out word of his
arrival via walkie talkie and cell phone, and presented him with a pair of
thick knee high boots, a hard hat, and a cellular phone, all carefully
labeled with his name. After a couple of minutes, a young Kinakutan man in
hard hat and muddy boots opens the trailer's door, introduces himself as
"Steve," and leads Randy into the entrance of the cavern. They follow a
narrow pedestrian board walk illuminated by a string of caged lightbulbs.
For the first hundred meters or so, the cave is just a straight passage
barely wide enough to admit two Goto trucks and the pedestrian lane. Randy
trails his hand along the wall. The stone is rough and dusty, not smooth
like the surface of a natural cavern, and he can see fresh gouges wrought by
jackhammers and drills.
He can tell by the echo that something's about to change. Steve leads
him out into the cavern proper. It is, well, cavernous. Big enough for a
dozen of the huge trucks to pull around in a circle to be laden with rock
and muck. Randy looks up, trying to find the ceiling, but all he sees is a
pattern of bluish white high intensity lights, like the ones in gymnasiums,
perhaps ten meters above. Beyond that it's darkness and mist.
Steve goes off in search of something and leaves Randy alone for a few
minutes, which is useful since it takes a long time for him to get his
bearings.
Some of the cavern wall is smooth and natural; the rest of it is rough,
marking the enlargements conceived by the engineers and executed by the
contractor. Likewise, some of the floor is smooth, and not quite level. Some
places it has been drilled and blasted to bring it down, others it has been
filled in to bring it up.
This, the main chamber, looks to be about finished. The offices of the
Ministry of Information will be here. There are two other, smaller chambers,
deeper inside the mountain, still being enlarged. One will contain the
engineering plant (power generators and so forth) and the other will be the
systems unit.
A burly blond man in a white hard hat emerges from a hole in the
chamber wall: Tom Howard, Epiphyte Corporation's vice president for systems
technology. He takes his hard hat off and waves to Randy, then beckons him
over.
The passageway that leads to the systems chamber is big enough that you
could drive a delivery van down it, but it's not as straight or as level as
the main entryway. It is mostly occupied by a conveyor system of terrifying
power and speed, which is carrying tons of dripping grey muck out towards
the main chamber to be dumped into the Goto trucks. In terms of apparent
cost and sophistication, it beats the same relationship to a normal conveyor
belt as an F 15 does to a Sopwith Camel. It is possible to speak but
impossible to be heard when you are near it, and so Tom and Randy and the
Kinakutan who calls himself Steve trudge silently down the passage for
another hundred or so meters until they reach the next cavern.
This one is only large enough to contain a modest one story house. The
conveyor passes right through the middle of it and disappears down another
hole; the muck is coming from deeper yet in the mountain. It's still too
loud in here to talk. The floor has been leveled by pouring in concrete, and
conduits rise from it every few meters with orange cables dangling from
their open tops: optical fiber lines.
Tom walks towards another opening in the wall. It appears that several
subsidiary caverns branch away from this one. Tom leads Randy through the
opening, then turns to put a hand on his arm and steady him: they are at the
top of a steep wooden staircase that has been built down a nearly vertical
shaft that descends a good five meters or so.
"What you just saw is the main switch room," Tom says. "That'll be the
largest router in the world when it's finished. We're using some of these
other chambers to install computers and mass storage systems. The world's
largest RAID, basically, buffered with a big, big RAM cache."
RAID means Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks; it is a way to store
vast quantities of information cheaply and reliably, and exactly the kind of
thing you would want to have in a data haven.
"So we're still cleaning out some of these other chambers," Tom
continues. "We discovered something, down here, that I thought you'd find
interesting." He turns around and begins to descend the staircase. "Did you
know that these caves were used as an air raid shelter by the Japanese,
during the war?"
Randy has been carrying the map page from his photocopied book around
in his pocket. He unfolds it and holds it up near a lightbulb. Sure enough,
it includes a site, up in the mountains, labeled ENTRANCE TO AIR RAID
SHELTER & COMMAND POST.
"And a command post?" Randy says.
"Yeah. How'd you know that?"
"Interlibrary loan," Randy says.
"We didn't know it until we got here and found all of these old cables
and electrical shit strung around the place. We had to tear it out so we
could string in our own."
Randy begins to descend the steps.
"This shaft was full of rocks," Tom says, "but we could see wires going
down into it, so we knew something had to be down here."
Randy looks nervously at the ceiling. "Why was it full of rocks? Was
there a cave in?"
"No," Tom says, "the Japanese soldiers did it. They threw rocks down
the shaft until it was full. It took a dozen of our laborers two weeks to
pull all the rocks out by hand."
"So, what did the wires lead to?"
"Lightbulbs," Tom says, "they were just electrical wires no
communications."
"Then what was it they were trying to hide down here?" Randy asks. He
has almost reached the bottom of the staircase, and he can see that there is
a room sized cavity.
"See for yourself" Tom says, and flicks a light switch.
The cavity is about the size of a one car garage, with a nice level
floor. There is a wooden desk, chair, and filing cabinet, fuzzy with fifty
years' growth of grey green fungus. And there is a metal footlocker, painted
olive drab, stenciled with Nipponese characters.
"I forced the lock on this thing," Tom says. He steps over to the
footlocker and flips the lid open. It is filled with books.
"You were expecting maybe gold bars?" Tom says, laughing at the
expression on Randy's face.
Randy sits down on the floor and grabs his ankles. He's staring open
mouthed at the books in the chest.
"You okay?" Tom asks. "Heavy, heavy deja vu," Randy says. "From this?"
"Yeah," Randy says, "I've seen this before."
"Where?"
"In my grandmother's attic."
***
Randy finds his way up out of the network of caverns and into the
parking lot. The warm air feels good on his skin, but by the time he has
reached the Epiphyte Corp. trailer to turn in his hard hat and boots, he has
begun to sweat again. He bids good bye to the three women who work there,
and once again is struck by their attentiveness, their solicitousness. Then
he remembers that he is not just some interloper. He is a shareholder, and
an important officer, in the corporation that employs them he is paying them
or oppressing them, take your pick.
He trudges across the parking lot, moving very slowly, trying not to
get that metabolic furnace het up. A second taxi has pulled alongside the
one that is waiting for Randy, and the drivers are leaning out of their
windows shooting the breeze.
As Randy approaches his taxi, he happens to glance back towards the
entrance of the cavern. Framed in its dark maw, and dwarfed by the
mountainous shapes of the Goto dump trucks, is a solitary man, silver
haired, stooped, but trim and almost athletic looking in a warmup suit and
sneakers. He is standing with his back to Randy, facing the cavern, holding
a long spray of flowers. He seems rooted in the mud, perfectly motionless.
The front door of the Goto Engineering trailer flies open. A young
Nipponese man in a white shirt, striped tie, and orange hard hat descends
the stairs and moves briskly towards the old man with the flowers. When he
is still some distance away, he stops, puts his feet together, and executes
a bow. Randy hasn't spent enough time around Nipponese to understand the
minutiae, but this looks to him like an extraordinarily major bow. He
approaches the old man with a bright smile and holds one beckoning hand out
towards the Goto trailer. The old man seems disoriented maybe the cavern
doesn't look like it used to but after a few moments he returns a
perfunctory bow and allows the young engineer to lead him out of the stream
of traffic.
Randy gets in his taxi and says, "Foote Mansion," to the driver.
He has been harboring an illusion that he will read Sean Daniel McGee's
war memoir slowly and thoroughly, from beginning to end, but this has now
gone the way of all illusions. He hauls the photocopied stack out of his bag
during the drive to the hotel and begins ruthless triage. Most of it has
nothing to do with Kinakuta at all it's about McGee's experiences fighting
in New Guinea and the Philippines. McGee is no Churchill, but he does have a
distant blarney tinged narrative talent, which makes even banal anecdotes
readable. His skills as raconteur must have made him a big hit around the
bar at the NCOs' Club; a hundred tipsy sergeants must have urged him to
write some of this shit down if he ever made it back to South Boston alive.
He did make it back, but unlike most of the other GIs who were in the
Philippines on V J day, he didn't go straight back home. He took a little
detour to the Sultanate of Kinakuta, which was still home to almost four
thousand Nipponese troops. This explains an oddity about his book. In most
war memoirs, V E Day or V J Day happens on the last page, or at least in the
last chapter, and then our narrator goes home and buys a Buick. But V J day
happens about two thirds of the way through Sean Daniel McGee's book. When
Randy sets aside the pre August 1945 material, an ominously thick stack of
pages remains. Clearly, Sergeant McGee has something to get off his chest.
The Nipponese garrison on Kinakuta had long since been bypassed by the
war, and like the other bypassed garrisons, had turned what energies they
had left to vegetable farming, and waiting for the extremely sporadic
arrivals of submarines, which, towards the close of the war, the Nipponese
used to haul the most extremely vital cargo and to ferry certain desperately
needed specialists, like airplane mechanics, from one place to another. When
they got Hirohito's broadcast from Tokyo, ordering them to lay down their
arms, they did so dutifully but (one has to suspect) gladly.
The only hard part was finding someone to surrender to. The Allies had
concentrated on planning the invasion of the Nipponese home islands, and it
took them a while to get troops out to the bypassed garrisons like Kinakuta.
McGee's account of the confusion in Manila is mordant at this point in the
book McGee starts to lose his patience, and his charm. He starts to rail.
Twenty pages later, he's sloshing ashore at Kinakuta City. He stands at
attention while his company captain accepts the surrender of the Nipponese
garrison. He posts a guard around the entrance to the cavern, where a few
diehard Nips have refused to surrender. He organizes the systematic
disarming of the Nipponese soldiers, who are terribly emaciated, and sees to
it that their rifles and ammunition are dumped into the ocean even as food
and medical supplies are brought ashore. He helps a small contingent of
engineers string barbed wire around the airfield, turning it into an
internment camp.
Randy flips through all of this during the drive to the hotel. Then,
words like "impaled" and "screams" and "hideous" catch his eye, so he flips
back a few pages and begins to read more carefully.
***
The upshot is that the Nipponese had, since 1940, marched thousands of
tribesmen out of the cool, clean interior of the island to its hot,
pestilential edge, and put them to work. These slaves had enlarged the big
cavern where the Nipponese built their air raid shelter and command post;
improved the road to the top of Eliza Peak, where the radar and direction
finding stations were perched; built another runway at the air field; filled
in more of the harbor; and died by thousands of malaria, scrub typhus,
dysentery, starvation, and overwork. These same tribesmen, or their bereaved
brothers, had then watched, from their redoubts high in the mountains, as
Sean Daniel McGee and his comrades came and stripped the Nipponese of their
armaments and concentrated them all in the airfield, guarded by a few dozen
exhausted GIs who were frequently drunk or asleep. Those tribesmen worked
around the clock, up there in the jungle, making spears, until the next full
moon illuminated the sleeping Nipponese like a searchlight. Then they poured
out of the forest in what Sean Daniel McGee describes as "a horde," "a
plague of wasps," "a howling army," "a black legion unleashed from the gates
of Hell," "a screaming mass," and in other ways he could never get away with
now. They flattened and disarmed the GI's, but did not hurt them. They flung
tree limbs over the barbed wire until the fence had become a highway, and
then swarmed into the airfield with their spears at the ready. McGee's
account goes on for about twenty pages, and, as much as anything else, is
the story of the night that one affable sergeant from South Boston became
permanently unhinged.
"Sir?"
Randy is startled to realize that the taxi's door is open. He looks
around and finds that he's under the awning of the Hotel Foote Mansion. The
door is being held open for him by a wiry young bellhop with a different
look than most of the Kinakutans Randy has encountered so far. This kid
perfectly matches Sean Daniel McGee's description of a tribesman from the
interior.
"Thank you," Randy says, and makes a point of tipping the fellow
generously.
His room is all done up in furniture designed in Scandinavia but
assembled locally from various endangered hardwoods. The view is towards the
interior mountains, but if he goes onto his tiny balcony he can see a bit of
water, a containership being unloaded, and most of the memorial garden built
by the Nipponese on the site of the massacre.
Several messages and faxes await him: mostly the other members of
Epiphyte Corp., notifying him that they have arrived, and letting him know
in which room they can be found. Randy unpacks his bags, takes a shower, and
sends his shirts down to the laundry for tomorrow. Then he makes himself
comfortable at his little table, boots his laptop, and pulls up the Epiphyte
(2) Corporation Business Plan.
Chapter 24 LIZARD
Bobby Shaftoe and his buddies are just out for a nice little morning
drive through the countryside.
In Italy.
Italy! He cannot fucking believe it. What gives?
Not his job to know. His job has been very clearly described to him. It
has to be clearly described, because it makes no sense.
In the good old days, back on Guadalcanal, his commanding officer would
say something like "Shaftoe, eradicate that pillbox!" and from there on out,
Bobby Shaftoe was a free agent. He could walk, run, swim or crawl. He could
sneak up and lob in a satchel charge, or he could stand off at a distance
and hose the objective down with a flame thrower. Didn't matter as long as
he accomplished the goal.
The goal of this little mission is completely beyond Shaftoe's
comprehension. They awaken him; Lieutenant Enoch Root; three of the other
Marines, including the radio man; and several of the SAS blokes in the
middle of the night, and hustle them down to one of the few docks in Malta
that hasn't been blasted away by the Luftwaffe. A submarine waits. They
climb aboard and play cards for about twenty four hours. Most of the time
they are on the surface, where submarines can go a hell of a lot faster, but
from time to time they dive, evidently for the best of reasons.
When next they are allowed up on the flat top of the submarine, it is
the middle of the night again. They are in a little cove in a parched,
rugged coastline; Shaftoe can see that much by the moonlight. Two trucks are
waiting for them. They open hatches in the sub's deck and begin to take
stuff out: into one of the trucks, the U.S. Marines load a bunch of cloth
sacks bulging with what appears to be all kinds of trash. Meanwhile, the
British Special Air Service are at work with wrenches, rags, grease and much
profanity in the back of the other truck, assembling something from crates
that they have brought up from another part of the submarine. This is
covered up by a tarp before Shaftoe can get a good look, but he recognizes
it as something you'd rather have pointed away from you.
There are a couple of dark men with mustachioes hanging around the dock
smoking and arguing with the skipper of the submarine. After all of the
stuff is unloaded, the skipper appears to pay them with more crates from the
submarine. The men pry a couple of them open for inspection, and appear to
be satisfied.
At this point Shaftoe still doesn't even know what continent they are
on. When he first saw the landscape he figured Northern Africa. When he saw
the men, he figured Turkey or something.
It is not until the sun comes up on their little convoy, and (lying in
the back of the truck on top of the sacks of trash, peeking out from under
the tarp) he is able to see road signs and Christian churches, that he
realizes it has to be Italy or Spain. Finally he sees a sign pointing the
way to ROMA and figures it's Italy. The sign points away from the midmorning
sun, so they must be somewhere south or southeast of Rome. They are also
south of some burg called Napoli.
But he doesn't spend a lot of time looking. It is not encouraged. The
truck is being driven by some fellow who speaks the language, and who stops
from time to time to converse with the natives. Some of the time this sounds
like friendly banter. Sometimes it sounds like arguments over highway
etiquette. Sometimes it is quieter, more guarded. Shaftoe figures out,
slowly, that during these exchanges the truck driver is bribing someone to
let them go through.
He finds it shocking that in a country actively embroiled in the middle
of the greatest war in history in a country run by belligerent Fascists for
God's sake two truckloads of heavily armed enemy soldiers can just drive
around freely, protected by nothing except a couple of five dollar tarps.
Criminy! What kind of a sorry operation is this? He feels like leaping to
his feet, casting the tarp aside, and giving these Eyties a good dressing
down. The whole place needs a good scrubbing with toothbrushes anyway. It's
like these people aren't even trying. Now, the Nips, think of them what you
will, at least when those guys declare war on you they mean it.
He resists the temptation to upbraid the Italians. He thinks it goes
against the orders he had thoroughly memorized before the shock of figuring
out that he was driving around in an Axis country jangled everything loose
from his brain. And if they hadn't come from the lips of Colonel Chattan
himself the chap or bloke who's the commanding officer of Detachment 2702 he
wouldn't have believed them anyway.
They are going to be putting in some bivouac time. They are going to
play a lot of cards for a while. During this time, the radio man is going to
be very busy. This phase of the operation might last as long as a week. At
some point, it is likely that strenuous, concerted efforts to kill them will
be made by a whole lot of Germans and, if they happen to be feeling
impetuous that day, Italians. When this happens, they are to send out a
radio message, torch the joint, drive to a certain field that passes for an
airstrip, and be picked up by those jaunty SAS flyboys.
Shaftoe didn't believe a word of it at first. He pegged it as some kind
of British humor thing, some kind of practical joke/hazing ritual. In
general he doesn't know what to make of the Brits because they appear (in
his personal observation) to be the only other people on the face of the
earth, besides Americans, who possess a sense of humor. He has heard rumors
that some Eastern Europeans can do it, but he hasn't met any of them, and
they don't have much to yuk it up about at the moment. In any case, he can
never quite make out when these Brits are joking.
Any thought that this was just a joke evaporated when he saw the
quantity of armaments they were being issued. Shaftoe has found that, for an
organization devoted to shooting and blowing up people on a large scale, the
military is infuriatingly reticent about passing out weapons. And most of
the weapons they do pass out are for shit. It is for this reason that
Marines have long found it necessary to buy their own tommy guns from home:
the Corps wants them to kill people, but they just won't give them the stuff
they need!
But this Detachment 2702 thing is a whole different outfit. Even the
grunts are carrying trench brooms! And if that didn't get their attention,
the cyanide capsules sure did. And the lecture from Chattan on the correct
way to blow your own head off ("you would be astonished at how many
otherwise competent chaps botch this apparently simple procedure").
Now, Shaftoe realizes that there is an unspoken codicil to Chattan's
orders: oh, yeah, and if any of the Italians, who actually live in Italy,
and who run the place, and who are Fascists and who are at war with us if
any of them notice you and, for some reason, object to your little plan,
whatever the fuck it is, then by all means kill them. And if that doesn't
work, please, by all means, kill yourself, because you'll probably do a
neater job of it than the Fascists will. Don't forget suntan lotion!
Actually, Shaftoe doesn't mind this mission. It is certainly no worse
than Guadalcanal. What bothers him (he decides, making himself comfortable
on the sacks of mysterious trash, staring up at a crack in the tarp) is not
understanding the purpose of it all.
The rest of the platoon may or may not be dead; he thinks he can still
hear some of them crying out, but it's hard to tell between the pounding of
the incoming surf and the relentless patter of the machine gun. Then he
realizes that some of them must be alive or else the Nips would not continue
to fire their gun.
Shaftoe knows that he is closer to the gun than any of his buddies. He
is the only one who has a chance.
It is at this point that Shaftoe makes his Big Decision. It is
surprisingly easy but then, really stupid decisions are always the easiest.
He crawls along the log to the point that is closest to the machine
gun. Then he draws a few deep breaths in a row, rises to a crouch, and
vaults over the log! He has a clear view of the cave entrance now, the comet
shaped muzzle flash of the machine gun tesselated by the black grid of the
net that they put up to reject incoming grenades. It is all remarkably
clear. He looks back over the beach and sees motionless corpses.
Suddenly he realizes they are still firing the gun, not because any of
his buddies are alive, but to use up all of their excess ammunition so that
they will not have to pack it out. Shaftoe is a grunt, and understands.
Then the muzzle swings abruptly towards him he has been sighted. He is
in the clear, totally exposed. He can dive into the jungle foliage, but they
will sweep it with fire until he is dead. Bobby Shaftoe plants his feet,
aims his .45 into the cave, and begins pulling the trigger. The barrel of
the machine gun is pointing at him now.
But it does not fire.
His .45 clicks. It's empty. Everything is silent except for the surf,
and for the screaming. Shaftoe holsters his .45 and pulls out his revolver.
The voice that is doing the screaming is unfamiliar. It's not one of
Shaftoe's buddies.
A Nipponese Imperial Marine bolts from the mouth of the cave, up above
the level of Shaftoe's head. The pupil of Shaftoe's right eye, the sights of
his revolver, and this Nip are all arranged briefly along the same line for
a moment, during which Shaftoe pulls the trigger a couple of times and
almost certainly scores a hit.
The Imperial Marine gets caught in the netting and plunges to the
ground in front of him.
A second Nip dives out of the cave a moment later, grunting
incoherently, apparently speechless with horror. He lands wrong and breaks
one of his leg bones; Shaftoe can hear it snap. He begins running towards
the surf anyway, hobbling grotesquely on the bad leg. He completely ignores
Shaftoe. There is terrible bleeding from his neck and shoulder, and loose
chunks of flesh flopping around as he runs.
Bobby Shaftoe holsters his revolver. He ought to shoulder his rifle and
plug the guy, but he is too confused to do anything for the moment.
Something red flickers in the mouth of the cave. He glances up that way
and sees nothing clear enough to register against the deafening visual noise
of the jungle.
Then he sees the flash of red again, and it disappears again. It was
shaped like a sharpened Y. It was shaped like the forked tongue of a
reptile.
Then a moving slab of living jungle explodes from the mouth of the cave
and crashes into the foliage below. The tops of the plants shake and topple
as it moves.
It is out, free and clear, on the beach. It is low to the ground,
moving on all fours. It pauses for a moment and flicks its tongue towards
the Imperial Marine who is now hobbling into the Pacific Ocean some fifty
feet distant.
Sand erupts into the air, like smoke from the burning tires of a drag
racer, and the lizard is rocketing across the beach. It covers the distance
to the Imperial Marine in one, two, three seconds, takes him in the backs of
the knees, takes him down hard into the surf. Then the lizard is dragging
the dead Nip back up onto the land. It stretches him out there among the
dead Americans, walks around him a couple of times, flicking its tongue, and
finally starts to eat him.
"Sarge! We're here!" says Private Flanagan. Before he even wakes up,
Bobby Shaftoe notices that Flanagan is speaking in a normal voice and does
not sound scared or excited. Wherever "here" is, it's not someplace
dangerous. They are not under attack.
Shaftoe opens his eyes just as the tarp is being peeled back from the
open top of the truck. He stares straight up into a blue Italian sky torn
around the edges by the scrabbling branches of desperate trees. "Shit!" he
says.
"What's wrong, Sarge?"
"I just always say that when I wake up," Shaftoe says.
***
Their new home turns out to be an old stone farm building in an olive
farm, plantation, orchard or whatever the fuck you call a place where olives
are grown. If this building were in Wisconsin, any cheesehead who passed by
would peg it as abandoned. Here, Shaftoe is not so sure. The roof has partly
collapsed into the building under the killing weight of its red clay tiles,
and the windows and doorways yawn, open to the elements. It's a big
structure, big enough that after several hours of sledgehammer work they are
able to drive one of the trucks inside and conceal it from airborne snoops.
They unload the sacks of trash from the other truck. Then the Italian guy
drives it away and never comes back.
Corporal Benjamin, the radio man, gets busy clambering up olive trees
and stringing copper wires around the place. The blokes of the SAS go out
and reconnoiter while the guys of the Marine Corps open the sacks of trash
and start spreading them around. There are several months' worth of Italian
newspapers. All of them have been opened, rearranged, haphazardly refolded.
Articles have been torn out, other articles circled or annotated in pencil.
Chattan's orders are beginning to filter back into Shaftoe's brain; he heaps
these newspapers in the corners of the barn, oldest ones first, newer ones
on top.
There is a whole sack filled with cigarette butts, carefully smoked to
the nub. They are of a Continental brand unfamiliar to Shaftoe. Like a
farmer broadcasting seeds, he carries this sack around the premises tossing
handfuls onto the ground, concentrating mostly on places where people will
actually work: Corporal Benjamin's table and another makeshift table they
have set up for eating and playing poker. Likewise with a salad of wine
corks and beer caps. An equal number of wine and beer bottles are flung, one
by one, into a dark and unused corner of the barn. Bobby Shaftoe can see
that this is the most satisfying work he will ever get, so he takes it over,
and flings those bottles like a Green Bay Packer quarterback firing spiral
passes into the sure hands of his plucky tight ends.
The blokes come back from reconnoitering and there is a swappage of
roles; the Marines now go out to familiarize themselves with the territory
while the SAS continue unloading garbage. In an hour's worth of wandering
around, Sergeant Shaftoe and Privates Flanagan and Kuehl determine that this
olive ranch is on a long skinny shelf of land that runs roughly north south.
To the west, the territory rises up steeply toward a conical peak that looks
suspiciously like a volcano. To the east, it drops, after a few miles, down
towards the sea. To the north, the plateau dead ends in some nasty,
impassable scrubland, and to the south it opens up on more farming
territory.
Chattan wanted him to find a vantage point on the bay, as convenient as
possible to the barn. Toward sunset, Shaftoe finds it: a rocky outcropping
on the slopes of the volcano, half an hour's walk northeast of the barn and
maybe five hundred feet above it in altitude.
He and his Marines almost don't find their way back to the barn because
it has been so well hidden by this point. The SAS have put up blackout
shades over every opening, even the small chinks in the collapsed roof. On
the inside, they have settled in comfortably to the pockets of usable space.
With all of the litter (now enhanced with chicken feathers and bones,
tonsorial trimmings and orange peels) it looks like they've been living
there for a year, which, Shaftoe guesses, is the whole point.
Corporal Benjamin has about a third of the place to himself. The SAS
blokes keep calling him a lucky sod. He has his transmitter set up now, the
tubes glowing warmly, and he has an unbelievable amount of paperwork. Most
of it's old and fake, just like the cigarette butts. But after dinner, when
the sun is down not only here but in London, he begins tapping out the Morse
code.
Shaftoe knows Morse code, like everyone else in the place. As the guys
and the blokes sit around the table, anteing up for what promises to be an
all night Hearts marathon, they keep one ear cocked towards Corporal
Benjamin's keying. What they hear is gibberish. Shaftoe goes and looks over
Benjamin's shoulder at one point, just to verify that he isn't crazy, and
sees he's right:
XYHEL ANAOG GFQPL TWPKI AOEUT
and so on and so forth, for pages and pages.
The next morning they dig a latrine and then proceed to fill it halfway
with a couple of barrels of genuine U.S. Mil. Spec. General Issue 100% pure
certified Shit. As per Chattan's instructions, they pour the shit in a
dollop at a time, throwing in handfuls of crumpled Italian newspapers after
each dollop to make it look like it got there naturally. With the possible
exception of being interviewed by Lieutenant Reagan, this is the worst
nonviolent job Shaftoe has ever had to do in the service of his country. He
gives everyone the rest of the day off, except for Corporal Benjamin, who
stays up until two in the morning banging out random gibberish.
The next day they make the observation post look good. They take turns
marching up there and back, up and back, up and back, wearing a trail into
the ground, and they scatter some cigarette butts and beverage containers up
there along with some general issue shit and general issue piss. Flanagan
and Kuehl hump a footlocker up there and hide it in the lee of a volcanic
rock. The locker contains books of silhouettes of various Italian and German
naval and merchant ships, and similar spotter's guides for airplanes, as
well as some binoculars, telescopes, and camera equipment, empty notepads,
and pencils.
Even though Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe is for the most part running this
show, he finds it uncannily difficult to arrange a moment alone with
Lieutenant Enoch Root. Root has been avoiding him ever since their eventful
flight on the Dakota. Finally, on about the fifth day, Shaftoe tricks him;
he and a small contingent leave Root alone at the observation point, then
Shaftoe doubles back and traps him there.
Root is startled to see Shaftoe come back, but he doesn't get
particularly upset. He lights up an Italian cigarette and offers Shaftoe
one. Shaftoe finds, irritatingly enough, that he is the nervous one. Root's
as cool as always.
"Okay," Shaftoe says, "what did you see? When you looked through the
papers we planted on the dead butcher what did you see?"
"They were all written in German," Root says.
"Shit!"
"Fortunately," Root continues, "I am somewhat familiar with the
language."
"Oh, yeah your mom was a Kraut, right?"
"Yes, a medical missionary," Root says, "in case that helps dispel any
of your preconceptions about Germans."
"And your Dad was Dutch."
"That is correct."
"And they both ended up on Guadalcanal why?"
"To help those who were in need."
"Oh, yeah."
"I also learned some Italian along the way. There's a lot of it going
around in the Church."
"Fuck me," Shaftoe exclaims.
"But my Italian is heavily informed by the Latin that my father
insisted that I learn. So I would probably sound rather old fashioned to the
locals. In fact, I would probably sound like a seventeenth century alchemist
or something."
"Could you sound like a priest? They'd eat that up."
"If worse comes to worst," Root allows, "I will try hitting them with
some God talk and we'll see what happens."
They both puff on their cigarettes and look out across the large body
of water before them, which Shaftoe has learned is called the Bay of Naples.
"Well anyway," Shaftoe says, "what did it say on those papers?"
"A lot of detailed information about military convoys between Palermo
and Tunis. Evidently stolen from classified German sources," Root says.
"Old convoys, or..."
"Convoys that were still in the future," Root says calmly. Shaftoe
finishes his cigarette, and does not speak for a while. Finally he says,
"Fuckin' weird." He stands up and begin