ped in
dripping papier mâché. They stuff it all into a canvas sack.
The skipper's bunk is on the aft or uphill end of the cabin. Shaftoe
strips it, looks under the pillow and under the mattress, finds nothing.
The fold out table is on the totally submerged end. Waterhouse wades
into it carefully, trying not to lose his footing. He finds the desk with
his feet, reaches down into the murk with his hands, explores as a blind man
would. He finds a few drawers which he is able to pull out of the desk
entirely and hand off to Shaftoe, who dumps their contents into the sack.
Within a short time he is pretty sure that there's nothing left in the desk.
The boat rises and slams down. As the sewage rolls forward, it exposes,
for just a moment, something in the corner of the cabin, something attached
to the forward bulkhead. Waterhouse wades over to identify it.
"It's a safe!" he says. He spins the dial. It's heavy. A good safe.
German. Shaftoe and the British officer look at each other.
A British sailor appears in the open hatchway. "Sir!" he announces.
"Another U boat has been sighted in the area."
"I'd love to have a stethoscope," Waterhouse hints. "This thing have a
sickbay?"
"No," says the British officer. "Just a box of medical gear. Should be
floating around somewhere."
"Sir! Yes sir!" Shaftoe says, and vanishes from the room. A minute
later he's back holding a German stethoscope up above his head to keep it
clean. He tosses it across the cabin to Waterhouse, who snares it in the
air, sockets it into his ears, and thrusts the business end down through the
sewage to the front of the safe.
He has done a little of this before, as an exercise. Kids who are
obsessed with locks frequently turn into adults who are obsessed with
crypto. The manager of the grocery store in Moorhead, Minnesota, used to let
the young Waterhouse play with his safe. He broke the combination, to the
manager's great surprise, and wrote a report about the experience for
school.
This safe is a lot better than that one was. Since he can't see the
dial anyway, he closes his eyes.
He is vaguely conscious that the other fellows on the submarine have
been shouting and carrying on about something for a while, as if some
sensational news has just come in. Perhaps the war is over. Then the head of
the stethoscope is wrenched loose from his grasp. He opens his eyes to see
Sergeant Shaftoe lifting it to his mouth as if it were a microphone. Shaftoe
stares at him coolly and speaks into the stethoscope: "Sir, torpedoes in the
water, sir." Then Shaftoe turns and leaves Waterhouse alone in the cabin.
Waterhouse is about halfway up the conning tower ladder, looking up at
a disk of greyish black sky, when the whole vessel jerks and booms. A piston
of sewage rises up beneath him and propels him upwards, vomiting him out
onto the top deck of the boat, where his comrades grab him and very
considerately prevent him from rolling off into the ocean.
The movement of the U 553 with the waves has changed. She's moving a
lot more now, as if she's about to break free from the reef.
It takes Waterhouse a minute to get his bearings. He is starting to
think he may have suffered some damage during all of that. Something is
definitely wrong with his left arm, which is the one he landed on.
Powerful light sweeps over them: a searchlight from the British
corvette that brought them here. The British sailors curse. Waterhouse
levers himself up on his good elbow and sights down the hull of the U boat,
following the beam of the searchlight to a bizarre sight. The boat has been
blown open just beneath the waterline, shards of her hull peeled back from
the wound and projecting jaggedly into the air. The foul contents of the
hull are draining out, staining the Atlantic black.
"Fuck!" Sergeant Shaftoe says. He shrugs loose from a small but heavy
looking knapsack that he's been carrying around, pulls it open. His sudden
activity draws the attention of the Royal Navy men who help out by pointing
their flashlights at his furious hands.
Waterhouse, who may be in some kind of delirium by this point, can't
quite believe what he sees: Shaftoe has pulled out a bundle of neat brownish
yellow cylinders, as thick as a finger and maybe six inches long. He also
takes out some small items, including a coil of thick, stiff red cord. He
jumps to his feet so decisively that he nearly knocks someone down, and runs
to the conning tower and disappears down the ladder.
"Jesus," an officer says, "he's going to do some blasting." The officer
thinks about this for a very small amount of time; the ship moves
terrifyingly with the waves and makes scraping noises which might indicate
it's sliding off the reef. "Abandon ship!" he hollers.
Most of them get into the whaler. Waterhouse is bundled back onto the
trolley contraption. He is about halfway across to the torpedo boat when he
feels, but scarcely hears, a sharp shock.
For the rest of the way over he can't really see diddly, and even after
he's back on the torpedo boat, all is confusion, and someone named Enoch
Root insists on taking him below and working on his arm and his head.
Waterhouse did not know until now that his head was damaged, which stands to
reason, in that your head is where you know things, and if it's damaged, how
can you know it? "You'll get at least a Purple Heart for this," Enoch Root
says. He says it with a marked lack of enthusiasm, as if he couldn't care
less about Purple Hearts, but is condescending to suppose that it will be a
big thrill for Waterhouse. "And Sergeant Shaftoe probably has another major
decoration coming too, damn him."
Chapter 33 MORPHIUM
Shaftoe still sees the word every time he closes his eyes. It would be
a lot better if he were paying attention to the work at hand: packing
demolition charges around the gussets that join the safe to the U boat.
MORPHIUM. It is printed thus on a yellowed paper label. The label is
glued to a small glass bottle. The color of the glass is the same deep
purple that you see when your eyes have been dazzled by a powerful light.
Harvey, the sailor who has volunteered to help him, keeps shining his
flashlight into Shaftoe's eyes. It is unavoidable; Shaftoe is wedged into a
surpassingly awkward position beneath the safe, working with the charges,
trying to set the primers with slimy fingers drained of warmth and strength.
This would not even be possible if the boat hadn't been torpedoed; before,
this cabin was half full of sewage and the safe was immersed in it. Now it
has been conveniently drained.
Harvey is not wedged into anything; he is being flung around by the
paroxysms of the U boat, which like a beached shark, is trying stupidly but
violently to thrash its way loose from the reef. The beam of his flashlight
keeps sweeping across Shaftoe's eyes. Shaftoe blinks, and sees a cosmos of
purple: tiny purple bottles labeled MORPHIUM.
"God damn it!" he hollers.
"Is everything all right, Sergeant?" Harvey says.
Harvey doesn't get it. Harvey thinks that Shaftoe is cursing at some
problem with the explosives.
The explosives are just fucking great. There's no problem with the
explosives. The problem is with Bobby Shaftoe's brain.
He was right there. Waterhouse sent him to find a stethoscope, and
Shaftoe went chambering through the U boat until he found a wooden box. He
opened it up and saw right away it was full of medic stuff. He pawed through
it, looking for what Waterhouse wanted, and there was the bottle, plain as
day, right in front of his face. His hand brushed against it, for god's
sake. He saw the label as the beam of his flashlight swept across it:
MORPHIUM.
But he didn't grab it. If it had said MORPHINE he would have grabbed it
in a second. But it said MORPHIUM. And it wasn't until about thirty seconds
later that he realized that this was a fucking German boat and of course the
words would all be different and there was about a 99 percent chance that
MORPHIUM was, in fact, exactly the same stuff as MORPHINE. When he realized
that he planted his feet in the passageway of the darkened U boat and let
out a deep long scream from way down in his gut. With the noise of the
waves, no one heard him. Then he continued onwards and carried out his duty,
handing over the stethoscope to Waterhouse. He carried out his duty because
he is a Marine.
Blowing this fucking safe off the wall is not his duty. It's just an
idea that popped into his head. They've been training him how to use these
explosives; why not put it into practice? He's blowing this safe up, not
because he is a Marine, but because he is Bobby Shaftoe. And also because
it's a great excuse to go back for that morphium.
The U boat bucks and sends Harvey sprawling to the deck. Shaftoe waits
for the motion to subside, then flails for handholds and pulls himself out
from under the safe. His weight is mostly on his feet now, but it wouldn't
be correct to say he's standing up. In this place, the best you can hope for
is to scramble for balance somewhat faster than you are falling on your
Keister. Harvey has just lost that race and Shaftoe is winning it for the
moment.
"Fire in the hole!" Shaftoe hollers. Harvey finds his feet! Shaftoe
gives him a helpful shove out into the passageway. Harvey turns left and
heads uphill for the conning tower and the exit. Shaftoe turns right. He
heads downhill. Towards the bow. Towards Davy Jones's Locker. Towards the
box with the MORPHIUM.
Where the fuck is that box? When he found it before, it was bobbing in
the soup. Maybe horrible thought maybe it just drained out of the hole made
by the torpedo. He passes through a couple of bulkheads. The boat's angle is
getting steeper all the time and he ends up walking backwards, like he's
descending a ladder, making handholds out of pipes, electrical cables, and
the chains that suspend the submarines' bunks. This boat is so damn long.
It seems like a strange way to kill people. Shaftoe's not sure if he
approves of everything that is implied by this U boat. Shaftoe has killed
Chinese bandits on the banks of the Yangtze by stabbing them in the chest
with a bayonet. He thinks he killed one, once, just by hitting him pretty
hard in the head. On Guadalcanal he killed Nips by shooting at them with
several different kinds of arms, by rolling rocks down on them, by
constructing large bonfires at the entrances to caves where they were holed
up, by sneaking up on them in the jungle and cutting their throats, by
firing mortars into their positions, even by picking one up and throwing him
off a cliff into the pounding surf. Of course he has known for a long time
that this face to face style of killing the bad guys is kind of old
fashioned, but it's not like he's spent a lot of time thinking about it. The
demonstration of the Vickers machine gun that he witnessed in Italy did sort
of get him thinking, and now here he is, inside one of the most famous
killing machines in the whole war, and what does he see? He sees valves. Or
rather the cast iron wheels that are used for opening and closing valves.
Entire bulkheads are covered with iron wheels, ranging from a couple of
inches to over a foot in diameter, packed in as densely as barnacles on a
rock, in what looks like a completely random and irregular fashion. They are
painted either red or black, and they are polished to a gleam from the
friction of men's hands.
And where it's not valves it's switches, huge Frankenstein movie ones.
There is one big rotary switch, half green and half red, that's a good two
feet in diameter. And it's not like this boat has a lot of windows in it.
It's got no windows at all. Just a periscope that can only be used by one
guy at a time. And so for these guys, the war comes down to being sealed up
in an airtight drum full of shit and turning valve wheels and throwing
switches on command, and from time to time maybe some officer comes back and
tells them that they just killed a bunch of guys.
There's that box it ended up on a bunk. Shaftoe yanks it closer and
hauls it open. The contents are all jumbled up, and there's more than one
purple bottle in there, and he panics for a moment, thinking he'll have to
read all of the labels in their creepy Germanic script, but in a few seconds
he finds the MORPHIUM, grabs it, pockets it.
He's on his way back up towards the conning tower when a big roller
slams into the outside of the boat and knocks him off balance. He tumbles
downhill for a long, long ways, doing backward somersaults straight down the
middle of the boat, before he gets himself under control. Everything has
gone black; he's lost his flashlight.
He comes very close to panicking now. It's not that he's a panicky guy,
just that it's been a while since he had morphine, and when he gets this
way, his body reacts badly to things. He's half blinded by a powerful flash
of blue light that is gone before his eyes have time to blink. There's a
sizzling noise down below. He moves his left hand and feels a tug on his
wrist: the flashlight's lanyard, which he had the presence of mind to wrap
around himself. The light scrapes and clanks against the steel grating on
which Shaftoe is now spreadeagled, like a saint on the gridiron. There's
another flash of blue light, reticulated by black lines, accompanied by a
sizzling noise. Shaftoe smells electricity. He raps the flashlight against
the grating a couple of times and it comes on again, flickeringly.
The grid's woven from pencil thick rods spaced a couple of inches
apart. He's facedown on it, looking into a hold that, if this U boat were
level, would be below him. The hold is a disaster, its neatly stacked and
crated contents now Osterized into a slumgullion of shattered glass,
splintered wood, foodstuffs, high explosives, and strategic minerals, all
mingled with seawater so that it sloshes back and forth with the rocking of
the dead U boat. A perfect, quivering globe of silver fills through the
grating right near his head and descends through his flashlight beam and
explodes against a piece of debris. Then another. He looks uphill and sees a
rain of silver globules bouncing and rolling down the deckplates toward him:
the mercury columns that they use to measure pressure must have been
ruptured. There's another blinding blue flash: an electrical spark with a
lot of power behind it. Shaftoe looks down through the grid again and
perceives that the hold is filled with huge metal cabinets with giant bolts
sticking out of them. Every so often a piece of wet debris will bridge the
gap between a couple of those bolts and a spark will light the place up: the
cabinets are batteries, they are what enable the U boat to run underwater.
As Sergeant Robert Shaftoe lies there with his face pressed against
that chilly grid, taking a few deep breaths and trying to regain his nerve,
a big wave rocks the boat back so hard that he's afraid he's going to fall
backwards and plummet all the way to the submerged bow. The swill in the
battery hold rolls downhill, gathering power and velocity as it falls, and
batters the forward bulkhead of the hold with terrifying power; he can hear
rivets giving way under the impact. As this happens, most of the battery
hold is exposed to the beam of Bobby Shaftoe's flashlight, all the way down
to the bottom. And that is when he sees the splintered crates down there
very small crates, such as might be used to contain very heavy supplies.
They have been busted open. Through the gaps in the wreckage, Shaftoe can
see yellow bricks, once neatly stacked, now scattered. They look exactly
like he would imagine gold bars. The only thing wrong with that theory is
that there are way too many of them down there for them to be gold bars. It
is like when he turned over rotten logs in Wisconsin and found thousands of
identical insect eggs sown on the dark earth, glowing with promise.
For a moment, he's tempted. The amount of money down there is beyond
calculation. If he could get his hands on just one of those bars The
explosives must have detonated, because Bobby Shaftoe has just gone deaf.
That's his cue to get the fuck out of here. He forgets about the gold
morphine's good enough plunder for one day. He half scrambles and half
climbs up the grid, up the passageway, up the skipper's cabin, smoke pouring
out of its hatch, its bulkheads now weirdly ballooned by the blast wave.
The safe has broken loose! And the cable that he and Harvey attached to
it, though it's damaged, is still intact. Someone must be hauling away on it
up abovedecks because it is stubbornly and annoying taut. Right now the safe
is caught up on jagged obstructions. Shaftoe has to pry it loose. The safe
jerks onward and upward, drawn by the taut cable, until it gets caught in
something else. Shaftoe follows the safe out of the cabin, up the
passageway, up the conning tower ladder, and finally levers himself up out
of the submarine and into the teeth of the storm, to a hearty cheer from the
waiting sailors.
No more than five minutes later, the U boat goes away. Shaftoe imagines
it tumbling end over end down the side of the reef, headed for an undersea
canyon, scattering gold bars and mercury globules into the black water like
fairy dust. Shaftoe's back on the corvette and everyone is pounding him on
the back and toasting him. He just wants to find a private place to open up
that purple bottle.
Chapter 34 SUIT
Randy's posture is righteous and alert: it is all because of his suit.
It is trite to observe that hackers don't like fancy clothes. Avi has
learned that good clothes can actually be comfortable the slacks that go
with a business suit, for example, are really much more comfortable than
blue jeans. And he has spent enough time with hackers to obtain the insight
that is it not wearing suits that they object to, so much as getting them
on. Which includes not only the donning process per se but also picking them
out, maintaining them, and worrying whether they are still in style this
last being especially difficult for men who wear suits once every five
years.
So it's like this: Avi has a spreadsheet on one of his computers,
listing the necks, inseams, and other vital measurements of every man in his
employ. A couple of weeks before an important meeting, he will simply fax it
to his tailor in Shanghai. Then, in a classic demonstration of the Asian
just in time delivery system as pioneered by Toyota, the suits will arrive
via Federal Express, twenty four hours ahead of time so that they can be
automatically piped to the hotel's laundry room. This morning, just as Randy
emerged from the shower, he heard a knock at his door, and swung it open to
reveal a valet carrying a freshly cleaned and pressed business suit,
complete with shirt and tie. He put it all on (a tenth generation photocopy
of a bad diagram of the half Windsor knot was thoughtfully provided). It fit
perfectly. Now he stands in a lobby of the Foote Mansion, watching electric
numbers above an elevator count down, occasionally sneaking a glance at
himself in a big mirror. Randy's head protruding from a suit is a sight gag
that will be good for grins at least through lunchtime.
He is pondering the morning's e mail.
To: dwarf@siblings.net
From: root@eruditorum.org
Subject: Re: Why?
Dear Randy,
I hope you don't mind if I address you as Randy, since it's quite
obvious that you are you, despite your use of an anonymous front. This is a
good idea, by the way. I applaud your prudence.
Concerning the possibility that I am ''an old enemy'' of yours. I'm
dismayed that one so young can already have old enemies. Or perhaps you are
referring to a recently acquired enemy of advanced years? Several candidates
come to mind. But I suspect you are referring to Andrew Loeb. I am not he.
This would be obvious to you if you had visited his website recently.
Why are you building the Crypt? Signed.
– BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK – (etc., etc.)
– END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK
It is not at all interesting to watch the numbers over the elevators
and try to predict which one will arrive first, but it is more interesting
than just standing there. One of them has been stuck on the floor above
Randy's for at least a minute; he can hear it buzzing angrily. In Asia many
business men especially some of the overseas Chinese would think nothing of
commandeering one of the hotel's elevators around the clock for their own
personal use, stationing minions in it, in eight hour shifts, to hold their
thumbs on the DOOR OPEN button, ignoring its self righteous alarm buzzer.
Ding. Randy spins around on the balls of his feet (just try that little
maneuver in a pair of sneakers!). Once again he has backed the wrong horse:
the winner is an elevator that was on the very top floor of the hotel last
time he scanned it. This is an elevator with purpose, a fast track lift. He
walks towards the green light. The doors part. Randy stares squarely into
the face of Dr. Hubert (the Dentist) Kepler, D.D.S.
Or perhaps you are referring to a recently acquired enemy of advanced
years?
"Good morning, Mr. Waterhouse! When you stand with your mouth open like
that, you remind me of one of my patients."
"Good morning, Dr. Kepler." Randy hears his words from the other end of
a mile long bumwad tube, and immediately reviews them in his own mind to
make sure he has not revealed any proprietary corporate information or given
Dr. Kepler any reason to file a lawsuit.
The doors start to close and Randy has to whack them open with his
laptop case.
"Careful! That's an expensive piece of equipment, I'd wager," says the
Dentist.
Randy is about to say I go through laptops like a transvestite goes
through nylons though maybe like a high speed drill through a necrotic molar
would be more thematically apropos, but instead he clams up and says nothing
at all, finding himself in dangerous territory: he is carrying proprietary
AVCLA information on this thing, and if the Dentist gets the impression that
Randy's being cavalier with it, he might spew out a barrage of torts, like
Linda Blair and the pea soup.
"It's, uh, a pleasant surprise to see you in Kinakuta," Randy stammers.
Dr. Kepler wears eyeglasses the size of a 1959 Cadillac's windshield.
They are special dentist eyeglasses, as polished as the Palomar mirror,
coated with ultrareflective material so that you can always see the
reflection of your own yawning maw in them, impaled on a shaft of hot light.
The Dentist's own eyes merely haunt the background, like a childhood memory.
They are squinty grey blue eyes, turned down at the edges as if he is tired
of the world, with Stygian pupils. A trace of a smile always seems to be
playing around his withered lips. It is the smile of a man who is worrying
about how to meet his next malpractice insurance payment while patiently
maneuvering the point of his surgical steel crowbar under the edge of your
dead bicuspid, but who has read in a professional magazine that patients are
more likely to come back, and less likely to sue you, if you smile at them.
"Say," he says, "I wonder if I could have a quick huddle with you sometime
later."
Spit, please.
Saved by the bell! They have reached the ground floor. The elevator
doors open to reveal the endangered marble lobby of the Foote Mansion.
Bellhops, disguised as wedding cakes, glide to and fro as if mounted on
casters. Not ten feet away is Avi, and with him are two beautiful suits from
which protrude the heads of Eb and John. All three heads turn towards them.
Seeing the Dentist, Eb and John adopt the facial expressions of B movie
actors whose characters have just taken small caliber bullets to the center
of the forehead. Avi, by contrast, stiffens up like a man who stepped on a
rusty nail a week ago and has just felt the first stirrings of the tetanus
infection that will eventually break his spine.
"We've got a busy day ahead of us," Randy says. "I guess my answer is
yes, subject to availability."
"Good. I'll hold you to it," says Dr. Kepler, and steps out of the
elevator. "Good morning, Mr. Halaby. Good morning, Dr. Föhr. Good morning,
Mr. Cantrell. Nice to see you all looking so very much like gentlemen."
Nice to see you acting like one.
"The pleasure is ours," Avi says. "I take it we'll be seeing you
later?"
"Oh, yes," says the Dentist, "you'll be seeing me all day." This
procedure will be a lengthy one, I'm afraid. He turns his back on them and
walks across the lobby without further pleasantries. He is headed for a
cluster of leather chairs nearly obscured by an explosion of bizarre
tropical flowers. The occupants of those chairs are mostly young, and all
smartly dressed. They snap to attention as their boss glides towards them.
Randy counts three women and two men. One of the men is obviously a gorilla,
but the women inevitably referred to as Fates, Furies, Graces, Norns, or
Harpies are rumored to have bodyguard training, and to carry weapons, too.
"Who are those?" John Cantrell asks. "His hygienists?"
"Don't laugh," Avi says. "Back when he was in practice, he got used to
having a staff of women do the pick and floss work for him. It shaped his
paradigm."
"Are you shitting me?" Randy asks.
"You know how it works," Avi says. "When you go to the dentist, you
never actually see the dentist, right? Someone else makes the appointment.
Then there's always this elite coterie of highly efficient women who scrape
the plaque out of the way, so that the dentist doesn't have to deal with it,
and take your X rays. The dentist himself sits in the back somewhere and
looks at the X rays he deals with you as this abstract greyscale image on a
little piece of film. If he sees holes, he goes into action. If not, he
comes in and exchanges small talk with you for a minute and then you go
home."
"So, why is he here?" demands Eberhard Föhr.
"Exactly!" Avi says. "When he walks into the room, you never know why
he's here to drill a hole in your skull, or just talk about his vacation in
Maui."
All eyes turn to Randy. "What went on in that elevator?"
"I nothing!" Randy blurts.
"Did you discuss the Philippines project at all?"
"He just said he wanted to talk to me about it."
"Well, shit." Avi says. "That means we have to talk about it first."
"I know that," Randy says, "so I told him that I might talk to him if I
had a free moment."
"Well, we'd best make damn sure you have no free moments today," Avi
says. He thinks for a moment and continues, "Did he have a hand in his
pocket at any time?"
"Why? You expecting him to pull out a weapon?"
"No," Avi says, "but someone told me, once, that the Dentist is wired."
"You mean, like a police informant?" John asks incredulously.
"Yeah," Avi says, like it's no big deal. "He makes a habit of carrying
a tiny digital recorder the size of a matchbook around in his pocket.
Perhaps with a wire running up inside his shirt to a tiny microphone
somewhere. Perhaps not. Anyway, you never know when he's recording you."
"Isn't that illegal or something?" Randy asks.
"I'm not a lawyer," Avi says. "More to the point, I'm not a Kinakutan
lawyer. But it wouldn't matter in a civil suit if he slapped us with a tort,
he could introduce any kind of evidence he wanted."
They all look across the lobby. The Dentist is standing flatfooted on
the marble, arms folded over his chest, chin pointed at the floor as he
absorbs input from his aides.
"He might have put his hand in his pocket. I don't remember," Randy
says. "It doesn't matter. We kept it extremely general. And brief."
"He could still subject the recording to a voice stress analysis, to
figure out if you were lying," John points out. He relishes the sheer
unbridled paranoia of this. He's in his element.
"Not to worry," Randy says, "I jammed it."
"Jammed it? How?" Eb asks, not catching the irony in Randy's voice. Eb
looks surprised and interested, It is clear from the look on his face that
Eb longs to get into a conversation about something arcane and technical.
"I was joking," Randy explains. "If the Dentist analyzes the recording,
he'll find nothing but stress in my voice."
Avi and John laugh sympathetically. But Eb is crestfallen. "Oh," Eb
says. "I was thinking that we could absolutely jam his device if we so
wanted."
"A tape recorder doesn't use radio," John says. "How could we jam it?"
"Van Eck phreaking," Eb says.
At this point, Tom Howard emerges from the cafe with a thoroughly
ravished copy of the South China Morning Post under his arm, and Beryl
emerges from an elevator, prepped for combat in a dress and makeup. The men
avert their eyes shyly and pretend not to notice. Greetings and small talk
ensue. Then Avi looks at his watch and says, "Let's head over to the
sultan's palace," as if he were proposing they go grab some french fries at
Mickey Ds.
Chapter 35 CRACKER
Waterhouse has to keep an eye on that safe; Shaftoe is itching to blow
it open with high explosives, and Chattan (who firmly overrules Shaftoe)
intends to ship it back to London so that it can be opened by experts at the
Broadway Buildings. Waterhouse only wants to have another crack at opening
it himself, just to see if he can do it.
Chattan's position is the correct one. Detachment 2702 has a very clear
and specialized mission which most certainly does not include opening safes
from U boats. For that matter, it does not include going onto abandoned U
boats to recover safes, or other crypto data, in the first place. The only
reason they did that was because they happened to be the only people with
Ultra clearance who were in the neighborhood, and U 553's precarious
position did not give Bletchley Park time to send out its own experts.
But Waterhouse's desire to open the safe himself has nothing to do with
Detachment 2702's mission, or his own personal duties, or even,
particularly, with winning the war. It is something that Lawrence Pritchard
Waterhouse is driven to do. His is not to reason why. Even as he was reeling
down that stretched line from U 553 to the torpedo boat, battered by waves
and wind and rain, with a busted arm and a busted head, not knowing from one
moment to the next whether he would make it back to the boat or plunge into
the Atlantic, he was remembering the infinitesimal tremors picked up by the
half frozen neurons in his fingertips as he twiddled the safe's submerged
dial. Even as Enoch Root patched him up on board the boat, Waterhouse was
constructing a crude mental model of how the safe's tumblers might be
constructed, visualizing the thing in his mind's eye. And even as the rest
of Detachment 2702 collapses into their cots and hammocks and sleeping bags
around the chapel of Qwghlm Castle, the splinted and bandaged Waterhouse
stalks the polished corridors of that building's better corner, looking for
a couple of used razor blades and a hunk of carbon.
The razors he finds in a rubbish bin and the carbon he steals from the
closet where Ghnxh keeps the galvanick lucipher. He brings them, plus a
brick sized crystal of hard glue and a blowtorch, back to the chapel, where
everyone else is sleeping. Enlisted men are in the nave, as befits Marines
who are basically a naval organization. Officers are in the transept:
Chattan has the south arm of it all to himself, Waterhouse and Root and the
SAS and USMC lieutenants have bunk beds in the north. A small moiety of
Detachment 2702's astounding tarp supply has, then, been hung up across the
eastern end of the place, partitioning off the chancel, Holy of Holies,
where once the Body and Blood of Christ were housed. Now it contains a
Hallicrafters Model S 27 15 tube superheterodyne radio receiver using state
of the art acorn tubes in its front end, capable of tuning VHF from 27 to
143 Megahertz and of receiving AM, FM, and CW, and including a signal
strength meter which would come in handy if they were really operating a
huffduff station here, which they aren't.
The lights are burning behind those tarps and one of the Marines is
snoring away in a chair in front of the altar. Waterhouse wakes him up and
sends him to bed. The Marine is ashamed; he knows he was supposed to be
awake, twiddling that antenna convincingly.
The radio itself has hardly been used they only turn it on when someone
comes to visit who is not in on the Secret. It sits there on the altar,
pristine, as if it had just come from the Hallicrafters factory in Chicago,
Illinois. All of the altar's fancy bits (if it ever had them) have long
since succumbed to fire, rot, plunder, or the gnawing tusks of nest building
skerries. What remains is a rectangular monolith of basalt, featureless
except for some marks from the tools that were used to quarry and shape it.
It is a perfect foundation for tonight's experiment.
Waterhouse gets the safe up there at some cost to the disks and
ligaments in his lower back. It is tubular in shape, like an excerpt of
naval gun barrel. He stands it up on its back end so that its round door,
with the round dial in the center, is staring up at the ceiling like a blind
eye, the radial lines on the dial looking very much like the striations of
an iris.
Behind that dial is a bunch of mechanical stuff that has gotten
Waterhouse completely pissed off, driven him into a frantic state. By
manipulating this dial in some way, he should be able to tease that
mechanical stuff into some configuration that allows the door to be opened.
That's all there is to it. That this door remains locked is an outrage. Why
should the tiny volume inside this safe much less than a single cubic foot
be so different from the space that Waterhouse moves through at will? What
the hell is inside there?
The glue looks like bad amber, flawed and bubbled but still beautiful.
He fires up the little blowtorch and plays the flame over one end of it. The
glue softens, melts, and drips onto the door of the safe, next to the dial,
forming a little puddle about the size of a silver dollar.
Working quickly, Waterhouse sets two single edged razor blades into it,
the blades dangerously upward facing, parallel and somewhat less than an
inch apart. He holds them in place for a few moments while the frigid metal
of the safe sucks the heat out of that glue and makes it hard again. He has
employed a pair of toothpicks as spacers to make sure that the blunt backs
of the blades do not actually touch the door of the safe; he does not want
an electrical connection between them.
He solders a wire onto each of the razor blades and runs the wires
across the altar toward the radio. Then he takes a little chunk of carbon
and lays it across the two blades, forming a bridge between them.
He tears open the back of the radio and does a bit of rewiring. Most of
the rig is already set up the way he needs it; basically he's looking for
something that will convert electrical impulses into sound and pump that
sound into the headphones, which is what a radio does. But the source of the
signal is no longer a transmitter on a U boat but rather the current flowing
up one of Waterhouse's wires, into the left razor blade, across the carbon
bridge, into the right razor blade, and back down the other wire.
Getting this hooked up the way he wants it takes some doing. When he
blunders down a blind alley and gets frustrated, he will go over and twiddle
the antenna for a while, pretending to zero in on a U boat. Then an idea
will occur to him and he will go back to work.
Sometime around dawn, he hears a squeal from the headphones: a pair of
Bakelite cups bridged by a contraption that looks like a primitive surgical
device, hooked up to the radio by a twisted pair of black and red wires. He
turns the volume down and claps the phones over his head.
He reaches out and lays one fingertip on the safe, and hears a painful
thud in his ears. He slides the fingertip over the surface of the cold metal
and hears a rasping sound. Any vibrations cause the bridge of carbon to
tremble on the razor blades, making and breaking the electrical connection,
modulating the electrical current. The blades and the carbon are a
microphone, and the microphone works almost too well.
He takes his hand off the safe and just sits there and listens for a
while. He can hear the footfalls of skerries going through the detachment's
rations. He can hear the impact of waves on the shore, miles away, and the
thump of the Taxi's bald tires on chuckholes out on the Road. Sounds like
the Taxi has a little alignment problem! He can hear the scrub, scrub of
Margaret cleaning the floor of the kitchen, and some minor arrhythmias in
the heartbeats of the enlisted men, and the boom of glaciers calving on the
coast of Iceland, and the squirrely drone of hastily machined propellers on
approaching convoy ships. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is plugged into the
Universe in a way that exceeds even what Bletchley Park has to offer.
The center of that particular universe is the Safe from U 553, and its
axis passes up through the center of the Dial, and now Waterhouse has his
hand on it. He turns the volume way down before he touches any thing so that
he won't blow his eardrums out. The Dial spins heavily but easily, as if
mounted on gas bearings. Still, there is mechanical friction in there which
is not perceptible to Waterhouse's admittedly frozen fingers but which comes
through in his earphones like a rockslide.
When the tumblers move, it sounds like Waterhouse is shooting the main
bolt on the Gate of Hell. It takes him a little while, and a few more false
starts, to get his bearings; he doesn't know how many numbers are in the
combination, or which way he should turn the dial to begin with. But with
experimentation, some patterns begin to show through, and eventually he
works out the following combination:
23 right 37 left 7 right 31 left 13 right and then there's a really
meaty click and he knows in his marrow that he can take off the headphones.
He spins a little wheel that is mounted on the front of the safe adjacent to
the dial. This withdraws the radial dogs that have been holding the door
shut. He hauls the door up, careful not to slash his hand on the twin
razors, and looks into the safe.
His feeling of disappointment that accompanies this action has nothing
to do with the contents of the safe. He is disappointed because he has
solved the problem, and has gone back to the baseline state of boredom and
low level irritation that always comes over him when he's not doing
something that inherently needs to be done, like picking a lock or breaking
a code.
He sticks his arm all the way down to the bottom of the safe and finds
a metal object about the size of a hot dog bun. He knew it would be there
because, like children investigating wrapped presents in the days before
Christmas, they have been tilting the safe this way and that, and when they
did, they heard something sliding from one end to the other going tink,
tonk, tink, tonk – and wondered what it was.
This object is so cold, and sucks the heat out of his hands so
efficiently, that it hur