re is no place for a helicopter to land. Terrain is extremely
rugged. The nearest sufficiently flat place is about one km. away. It would
have to be cleared. In Vietnam this was accomplished using 'blockbuster"
bombs, but this is probably not an option here. Trees would have to be cut
down, creating a gap in the jungles conspicuous from the air.
Q: Who cares if it's conspicuous? Who's going to see it?
A: As should be obvious from my anecdote, the people who control this
gold have connections in Manila. We may assume that the area is overflown by
the Philippine Air Force regularly, and kept under radar surveillance.
Q: What would be involved in getting the bars to the nearest decent
road?
A: They would have to be carried over the jungle trails I have
described. Each bar weighs as much as a full grown man.
Q: Couldn't they be cut up into smaller pieces?
A: DMS rates it as unlikely that the current owners would permit this.
Q: Is there any chance of smuggling the gold through the military
checkpoints?
A: Obviously not in the case of a mass shipment. The gold weighs a
total of around ten tons, and would require a truck that could not negotiate
most of the roads we saw. Concealing ten tons of goods from the inspectors
at these checkpoints is not possible.
Q: How about smuggling the bars out one at a time?
A: Still very tricky. Might be possible to hike the bars out to an
intermediate point somewhere, melt or chop them down, and somehow secrete
them in the body of a jeepney or other vehicle, then drive the vehicle to
Manila and extract the gold. This operation would have to be repeated a
hundred times. Driving the same vehicle past one of these checkpoints a
hundred (or even two) times would strike them as, to put it mildly, odd.
Even if this were possible there is the payment issue.
Q: What is the payment issue?
A: Obviously the people who control the gold want to be paid for it.
Paying them in more gold, or in precious gems, would be ludicrous. They do
not have bank accounts. They have to be paid in Philippine pesos. Anything
bigger than about a 500 peso note is useless in this area. A 500 peso note
is worth about $20, and so it would be necessary to bring six million of
them into the jungle to perform the transaction. Based on some rudimentary
calculations I have made here using a mechanic's caliper and the contents of
my wallet, the stack of 500 peso notes would be about (please wait while I
switch my calculator over to the "scientific notation" mode) 25,000 inches
high. Or, if you prefer the metric system, something like two thirds of a
kilometer. If you stacked the bills a meter high, you would need six or
seven hundred such stacks, which if jammed close together would cover an
area about three meters on a side. Basically we are talking about a large
Ryder box truck full of money. This would have to be transported into the
middle of the jungle, and obviously, melting down cash and secreting it
inside of a truck is not an option.
Q: Since the military seems to be the big obstacle here, why not simply
cut a deal with them? Let them keep a big cut of the proceeds in exchange
for not hassling us.
A: Because the money would go to the NPA which would use it to buy
weapons for the purpose of killing people in the military.
Q: There must be some way to use the value of this gold to leverage
some kind of extraction operation.
A: The gold is worthless to a bank until it has been assayed. Until
then it is only a blurry Polaroid of a stack of yellow objects in what seems
to be a jungle. In order to perform an assay you need to go into the jungle,
find the gold, bore out a sample, and transport it safely back to a large
city. But this proves nothing. Even if the potential backers believe that
your assay really came from the jungle (i.e., that you did not switch
samples along the way) all they know now is the purity of one end of one bar
in the stack. Basically it is not possible to obtain full value for this
gold until the entire stack has been extracted and taken to a vault where it
can be systematically assayed.
Q: Could you maybe just get the gold to some local bank and then sell
it at steep discount, so that the burden of transporting it would be on
someone else's shoulders?
A: DMS relates the tale of one such transaction, in a provincial town
in north Luzon, which was interrupted when local entrepreneurs literally
blew one of the bank's walls off with dynamite, came in, and grabbed both
the gold and the cash that was going to be used to pay for the gold. DMS
asserts he would rather slit his own throat quietly than walk into a small
town bank with anything worth more than a few tens of thousands of dollars.
Q: Is the situation basically impossible then?
A: It is basically impossible.
Q: Then what was the point of the whole exercise?
A: To come full circle to the first thing DMS said. It was to send us a
message.
Q: What is the message?
A: That money is not worth having if you can't spend it.
That certain people have a lot of money that they badly want to spend.
And that if we can give them a way to spend it, through the Crypt, that
these people will be very happy. and conversely that if we screw up they
will be very sad, and that whether they are happy or sad they will be eager
to share these emotions with us, the shareholders and management team of
Epiphyte Corp.
And now I am going to e mail this to all of you and then summon the
flight attendant and demand the array of alcoholic beverages I so richly
deserve. Cheers.
– R
Randall Lawrence Waterhouse
Current meatspace coordinates, hot from the GPS receiver card in my
laptop:
27 degrees, 14.95 minutes N latitude 143 degrees. 17.44 minutes E
longitude
Nearest geographical feature: the Bonin Islands
Chapter 60 ROCKET
Julieta has retreated somewhere far up beyond the Arctic Circle.
Shaftoe has been pursuing her like a dogged Mountie, slogging across the
sexual tundra on frayed snowshoes and leaping heroically from floe to floe.
But she remains about as distant, and about as reachable, as Polaris. She
has spent more time lately with Enoch Root than with him and Root's a
celibate priest or something. Or is he?!
On the few occasions Bobby Shaftoe has actually gotten Julieta to crack
a smile, she has immediately begun to ask difficult questions: Did you have
sex with Glory, Bobby? Did you use a condom? Is it possible that she might
have become pregnant? Can you absolutely rule out the possibility that you
have a child in the Philippines? How old would he or she be right now? Let's
see, you fucked her on Pearl Harbor Day, so the child would have been born
in early September of '42. Your child would be fourteen, fifteen months old
now perhaps just learning to walk! How precious!
It always gives Shaftoe the willies when tough girls like Julieta get
all fluttery and slip into baby talk. At first, he figures it's all a ruse
to keep him at arm's length. This smuggler's daughter, this atheist guerilla
intellectual what does she care about some girl in Manila? Snap out of it,
woman! There's a war on!
Then he comes up with a better explanation: Julieta's pregnant.
The day begins with the sound of a ship's horn in the harbor at
Norrsbruck. The town is a jumble of neat, wide houses packed onto a spur of
rock that sticks out into the Gulf of Bothnia, forming the southern shore of
a slender but deep inlet lined with wharves. Half the town now turns out
beneath an unsettling, turbulent peach and salmon dawn to see this quaint
harbor being deflowered by an inexorable steel phallus. It comes complete
with spirochetes: several score men in black dress uniforms stand on the top
of the thing, lined up neat as stanchions. As the blast of the horn fades
away, echoing back and forth between the stony ridges, it becomes possible
to hear the spirochetes singing: belting out a bawdy German sea chanty which
Bobby Shaftoe last heard during a convoy attack in the Bay of Biscay.
Two other people in Norrsbruck will recognize that tune. Shaftoe looks
for Enoch Root in his church cellar, but he is not present, his bed and lamp
are cold. Maybe the local chapter of Societas Eruditorum holds its meetings
before dawn or maybe he's found another welcoming bed. But trusty old Günter
Bischoff can be seen, leaning out the window of his seaside garret, elbows
in the air and his trusty Zeiss 735 binoculars clamped over his face,
scanning the lines of the invading ship.
The Swedes stand with arms folded for a minute or so, regarding this
apparition. Then they make some kind of collective decision that it does not
exist, that nothing has happened here. They turn their backs, pad grumpily
into their houses, begin to boil coffee. Being neutral is no less strange,
no less fraught with awkward compromises, than being a belligerent. Unlike
most of Europe, they can rest assured that the Germans are not here to
invade them or sink their ships. On the other hand, the vessel's presence is
a violation of their sovereign territory and they ought to run down there
with pitchforks and flintlocks and fight the Huns off. On the third hand,
this boat was probably made out of Swedish iron.
Shaftoe fails, at first, to recognize the German vessel as a U boat
because it is shaped all wrong. A regular U boat is shaped like a surface
vessel, except longer and skinnier. Which is to say it has a sort of V
shaped hull and a flat deck, studded with guns, from which rises a gigantic
conning tower that is covered with junk: ack ack guns, antennas, stanchions,
safety lines, spray shields. The Krauts would put cuckoo clocks up there too
if they had room. As a regular U boat plunges through the waves, thick black
smoke spews from its diesel engines.
This one is just a torpedo as long as a football field. Instead of a
conning tower there's a streamlined bulge on the top, hardly noticeable.
No guns, no antennas, no cuckoo clocks; the whole thing's as smooth as
a river rock. And it's not making smoke or noise, just venting a little bit
of steam. The diesels don't rumble. The fucking thing doesn't even seem to
have diesels. Instead there is a dim whine, like the sound that came out of
Angelo's Messerschmidt.
Shaftoe intercepts Bischoff just as the latter is coming down the steps
of the inn carrying a duffel bag the size of a dead sea lion. He's panting
with exertion, or maybe excitement. "That's the one," he gasps. He sounds
like he's talking to himself, but he's speaking English, so he must be
addressing Shaftoe. "That's the rocket."
"Rocket?"
"Runs on rocket fuel hydrogen peroxide, eighty five percent. Never has
to recharge its verdammt batteries! Clocks twenty eight knots submerged!
That's my baby." He's as fluttery as Julieta.
"Can I help you carry anything?"
"Footlocker upstairs," Bischoff says.
Shaftoe stomps up the narrow staircase to find Bischoff's room stripped
to the bedsprings, and a pile of gold coins on the table, weighing down a
thank you note addressed to the owners. The black locker rests in the middle
of the floor like a child's coffin. A wild hollering noise reaches his ears
through the open window.
Bischoff is down there, heading for the pier beneath his duffel bag,
and his men, up on the rocket, have caught sight of him. The U boat has
launched a dinghy, which is surging towards the pier like a racing scull.
Shaftoe heaves the locker up onto his shoulder and trudges down the
stairs. It reminds him of shipping out, which is what Marines are supposed
to do, and which he has not actually done in a long time. Vicarious
excitement is not as good as the real thing, he finds.
He follows Bischoff's tracks through a film of snow, down the
cobblestone street, and onto the pier. Three men in black scramble out of
the launch, onto the ladder, up to the pier. They salute Bischoff and then
two of them embrace him. Shaftoe's close enough and the salmon light is
bright enough, that he can recognize these two: members of Bischoff's old
crew. The third guy is taller, older, gaunter, grimmer, better dressed, more
highly decorated. All in all, more of a Nazi.
Shaftoe can't believe himself. When he picked up the locker he was just
being considerate to his friend Günter an ink stained retiree with pacifist
leanings. Now, all of a sudden, he's aiding and abetting the enemy! What
would his fellow Marines think of him if they knew?
Oh, yeah. Almost forgot. He is actually participating in the conspiracy
that he, Bischoff, Rudy von Hacklheber, and Enoch Root created in the
basement of that church. He comes to a dead stop and slams the locker down
right there, in the middle of the pier. The Nazi is startled by the noise
and raises his blue eyes in the direction of Shaftoe, who prepares to stare
him down.
Bischoff notices this. He turns towards Shaftoe and shouts something
cheerful in Swedish. Shaftoe has the presence of mind to break eye contact
with the chilly German. He grins and nods back. This conspiracy thing is
going to be a real pain in the ass if it means backing down from casual
fistfights.
A couple of sailors have come up the ladder now to handle Bischoff's
luggage. One of them strides down the pier to get the footlocker. Shaftoe
recognizes him, and he recognizes Shaftoe, at the same moment. Damn! The
guy's surprised, but not unpleasantly so, to see Shaftoe here. Then
something occurs to him and his face freezes up in horror and his eyes dart
sideways, back toward the tall Nazi. Shit! Shaftoe turns his back on all of
this, makes like he's strolling back into town.
"Jens! Jens!" Bischoff hollers, and then says something else in
Swedish. He's running after Shaftoe. Shaftoe keeps his back prudently turned
until Bischoff throws one arm around him with a final "JENS!" Then, sotto
voce, in English: "You have my family's address. If I don't see you in
Manila, let's get in touch after the war." He starts pounding Shaftoe on the
back, pulls some paper money out of his pocket, stuffs it into Shaftoe's
hand.
"Goddamn it, you'll see me there," Shaftoe says. "What is this shit
for?"
"I am tipping the nice Swedish boy who carried my luggage," Bischoff
says.
Shaftoe sucks his teeth and grimaces. He can tell he is not cut out for
this cloak and dagger nonsense. Questions come to his mind, among them How
is that big torpedo full of rocket fuel safer than what you were riding
around in before? but he just says, "Good luck, I guess."
"Godspeed, my friend," Bischoff says. "This will remind you to check
your mail." Then he punches Shaftoe in the shoulder hard enough to raise a
three day welt, turns around, and begins walking towards salt water. Shaftoe
walks towards snow and trees, envying him. The next time he looks at the
harbor, fifteen minutes later, the U boat is gone. Suddenly this town feels
just as cold, empty, and out in the middle of nowhere as it really is.
He's been getting his mail at the Norrsbruck post office, general
delivery. When the place opens up a couple of hours later, Shaftoe's waiting
by the door; venting steam from his nostrils, like he's rocket fuel powered.
He receives a letter from his folks in Wisconsin, and one large envelope,
posted yesterday from somewhere in Norrsbruck, Sweden, bearing no return
address but inscribed in Günter Bischoff's hand.
It is full of notes and documents concerning the new U boat, including
one or two letters personally signed by John Huncock himself. Shaftoe's
German is slightly better than it was before he went on his own U boat ride,
but he still can't follow most of it. He sees a lot of numbers there, a lot
of technical looking stuff.
It is your basic priceless naval intelligence. Shaftoe wraps the papers
up carefully, sticks them in his pants, begins walking up the beach towards
the Kivistik residence.
It is a long, cold, wet trudge. He has plenty of time to assess his
situation: stuck in a neutral country on the other side of the world from
where he wants to be. Alienated from the Corps. Lumped in with a vague
conspiracy.
Technically speaking, he has been AWOL for several months now. But if
he suddenly turns up at the American Embassy in Stockholm, carrying these
documents, all will be forgiven. So this is his ticket home. And "home" is a
very large country that includes places like Hawaii, which is closer to
Manila than is Norrsbruck, Sweden.
Otto's boat is fresh in from Finland, bobbing on an incoming tide, tied
up to his bird's nest of a jetty. The boat, he knows, is still loaded up
with whatever Finns are exchanging for coffee and bullets at the moment.
Otto himself is sitting in the cabin, drinking coffee naturally, red eyed
and plumb wrung out.
"Where's Julieta?" Shaftoe says. He's starting to worry that she moved
back to Finland or something.
Otto turns a bit greyer every time he drives his tub across the Gulf of
Bothnia. He looks especially grey today. "Did you see that monster?" he
says, then shakes his head in a combination of wonderment, disgust, and
world weariness that can only be attained by hardened Finns. "Those German
bastards!"
"I thought they were protecting you from the Russians."
This elicits a long thunder roll of dark, chortling laughter from Otto.
"Zdrastuytchye, tovarishch!" he finally says.
"Say what?"
"That means, 'Welcome, comrade' in Russian," Otto says. "I have been
practicing it."
"You should be practicing the Pledge of Allegiance," Shaftoe says.
"Soon as we get done taking down the Germans, I figure we'll just kick her
into high gear and beat the Russkies all the way back to Siberia."
More laughter from Otto, who knows naïveté when he sees it, but is not
above finding it charming. "I have buried the German air turbine in
Finland," he says. "I will sell it to the Russians or the Americans whoever
gets there, first."
"Where's Julieta?" Shaftoe asks again. Speaking of naïveté.
"In town," Otto says. "Shopping."
"So you've got cash."
Otto looks seasick. Tomorrow is payday.
Then Shaftoe's going to be on a bus, headed for Stockholm.
Shaftoe sits down across from Otto and they drink coffee and talk about
weather, smuggling, and the relative merits of various small fully automatic
weapons for a while. Actually, what they are talking about is whether
Shaftoe will get paid, and how much.
In the end, Otto issues a guarded promise to pay, provided that Julieta
does not spend all of the money on her "shopping" trip, and provided that
Shaftoe unloads the boat.
So Bobby Shaftoe spends the rest of the day carrying Soviet mortars,
rusty tins of caviar, bricks of black tea from China, Lapp folk art, a
couple of icons, cases of pine flavored Finnish schnapps, coils of vile
sausages, and bundles of pelts up out of the hold of Otto's boat, down the
dock, into the cabin.
Meanwhile, Otto goes into town, and still has not come back long after
night has fallen. Shaftoe sacks out in the cabin, tosses and turns for about
four hours, sleeps for about ten minutes, and then is awakened by a knocking
at the door.
He approaches the door on hands and knees, gets the Suomi machine
pistol out of its hiding place, then crawls to the far end of the cabin and
exits silently through a trap door in the floor. There is ice on the rocks
below, but his bare feet give him enough traction to clamber around and get
a good view of whoever is standing there, pounding on the door.
It is Enoch Root himself, nowhere to be seen this last week or so.
"Yo!" Shaftoe says.
"Bobby," Root says, turning around, "I gather you heard."
"Heard what?"
"That we are in danger."
"Nah," Shaftoe says, "this is just how I always answer the door."
They go into the cabin. Root declines to turn on any lights and keeps
looking out the windows like he's expecting someone. He smells faintly of
Julieta's perfume, a distinctive scent that Otto has been smuggling into
Finland by the fifty five gallon drum. Somehow, Shaftoe is not surprised by
this. He proceeds to make coffee.
"A very complex situation has arisen," Root says.
"I can see that."
Root is startled by this, and looks up blankly at Shaftoe, his eyes
glowing stupidly in the moonlight. You can be the smartest guy in the world,
but when a woman comes into the picture, you're just like any other sap.
"Did you come all this way to tell me that you're fucking Julieta?"
"Oh, no, no, no!" Root says. He stops for a moment, furrows his brow.
"I mean, I am. And I was going to tell you. But that's just the first part
of a more complicated business." Root gets up, shoves hands in pockets,
walks around the cabin again, looking out the windows. "You have any more of
those Finnish guns?"
"In that crate to your left," Shaftoe says. "Why? We gonna have a
shootout?"
"Maybe. Not between you and me! But other visitors may be coming."
"Cops?"
"Worse."
"Finns?" Because Otto has his rivals.
"Worse."
"Who then?" Shaftoe can't imagine worse.
"Germans. German."
"Oh, fuck!" Shaftoe hollers disgustedly. "How can you say they're worse
than Finns?"
Root looks taken aback. "If you're going to tell me that Finns are
worse, pound for pound, than Germans, then I agree with you. But the trouble
with Germans is that they tend to be in communication with millions of other
Germans."
"Okay," Shaftoe mutters.
Root hauls the lid off a crate, pulls out a machine pistol, checks the
chamber, aims the barrel at the moon, peers through it like a telescope. "In
any case, some Germans are coming to kill you."
"Why?"
"Because you know too much about certain things."
"What certain things? Günter and his new submarine?"
"Yes."
"And how, may I ask, do you know this? It has something to do with the
fact that you're fucking Julieta, right?" Shaftoe continues. He's bored
rather than pissed off. This whole Sweden thing is old and tired to him now.
He belongs in the Philippines. Anything that doesn't get him closer to the
Philippines just irritates him.
"Right." Root heaves a sigh. "She thinks highly of you, Bobby, but
after she saw that picture of your girlfriend "
"Snap out of it! She doesn't give a shit about you or me. She just
wants to have all of the good parts of being a Finn without the bad parts."
"What are the bad parts?"
"Having to live in Finland," Shaftoe says. "So she has to marry someone
with a good passport. Which nowadays means American or British. You might
have noticed that she didn't fuck Günter."
Root looks a little queasy.
"Well, maybe she did then," Shaftoe says, heaving a sigh. "Shit!" Root
has rooted an ammo clip out of another crate and figured out how to affix it
to the Suomi. He says, "You probably know that the Germans have a tacit
arrangement with the Swedes."
"What does 'tacit' mean?"
"Let's just say they have an arrangement."
"The Swedes are neutral, but they let the Krauts push them around."
"Yes. Otto has to deal with Germans at each end of his smuggling route,
in Sweden and in Finland, and he has to deal with their navy when he's out
on the water."
"I'm aware that the fucking Germans are all over Europe."
"Well, to make a long story short, the local Germans have prevailed
upon Otto to betray you," Root says.
"Did he?"
"Yes. He did betray you."
"Okay. Keep talking, I'm listening to you," Shaftoe says. He begins to
mount a ladder up into the attic, but then he thought better of it.
"I guess you could say he repented," Root says.
"Spoken like a true man of the cloth," Shaftoe mutters. He's into the
attic now, crawling on hands and knees over the rafters. He stops and sparks
up his Zippo. Most of its light is absorbed by a dark green slab: a crude
wooden crate with Cryllic letters stenciled on it.
Root's voice is filtering up from below: "He came to, uh, the place
where Julieta and I, uh, were."
Were fucking. "Get me the crowbar," Shaftoe shouts. "It's in Otto's
toolbox, under the table."
A minute later, the crowbar rises up through the hatch, like the head
of a cobra emerging from a basket. Shaftoe grabs it and begins assaulting
the crate.
"Otto was torn. He had to do what he did, or the German could have shut
down his livelihood. But he respects you. He couldn't bear it. He had to
talk to someone. So he came to us, and told Julieta what he had done.
Julieta understood."
"She understood!?"
"But she also was horrified at the same time."
"That is truly heartwarming."
"Um, at that point, the Kivistiks broke out the schnapps and began to
discuss the situation. In Finnish."
"I understand," Shaftoe says. Give those Finns a grim, stark, bleak
moral dilemma and a bottle of schnapps and you could pretty much forget
about them for forty eight hours. "Thanks for having the guts to come out
here."
"Julieta will understand."
"That's not what I mean."
"Oh, I don't think Otto would hurt me.
"No, I mean "
"Oh!" Root exclaims. "No, I had to tell you about Julieta sooner or
later "
"No, goddamn it, I mean the Germans."
"Oh. Well, I didn't even begin to think about them until I was almost
here. It was not courage so much as a lack of foresight."
Shaftoe's pretty good at foresight. "Take this." He hands down a heavy
steel tube of coffee can diameter, a few feet long. "It's heavy," he adds,
as Root's knees buckle.
"What is it?"
"A Soviet hundred and twenty millimeter mortar," Shaftoe says. "Oh."
Root remains silent for a while, as he lays the mortar down on the table.
When he speaks again, his voice sounds different. "I didn't realize Otto had
this kind of stuff."
"The lethal radius of this bitch is a good sixty feet," Shaftoe says.
He is hauling mortar bombs out of the crate and stacking them next to the
hatch. "Or maybe it's meters, I can't remember." The bombs look like fat
footballs with tailfins on one end.
"Feet, meters . . . the distinction is important," Root says. "Maybe
it's overkill. But we have to get back to Norrsbruck and take care of
Julieta."
"What do you mean, take care of her?" Root says warily.
"Marry her."
"What?"
"One of us has to marry her, and fast. I don't know about you, but I
kind of like her, and it'd be a shame if she spent the rest of her life
sucking Russian dick at gunpoint," Shaftoe says. "Besides, she might be
pregnant with one of our kids. Yours, mine, or Günter's."
"We, the conspiracy, have an obligation to look after our offspring,"
Root agrees. "We could establish a trust fund for them in London."
"There should be plenty of money for that," Shaftoe agrees. "But I
can't marry her, because I have to be available to marry Glory when I get to
Manila."
"Rudy can't do it," Root says.
"Because he's a fag?"
"No, they marry women all the time," Root says. "He can't do it because
he's German, and what's she going to do with a German passport?"
"It would not be savvy exactly," Shaftoe agrees.
"That leaves me," Root says. "I'll marry her, and she'll have a British
passport. Best in the world."
"Huh," Shaftoe says, "how does that square with your being a celibate
monk or priest or whatever the fuck you supposedly are?"
Root says, "I'm supposed to be celibate "
"But you're not," Shaftoe reminds him.
"But God's forgiveness is infinite," Root fires back, winning the
point. "So, as I was saying, I'm supposed to be celibate but that doesn't
mean I can't get married. As long as I don't consummate the marriage."
"But if you don't consummate it, it doesn't count!"
"But the only person, besides me, who will know that we didn't
consummate it, is Julieta."
"God will know," Shaftoe says.
"God doesn't issue passports," Root says.
"What about the church? They'll kick you out."
"Maybe I deserve to be kicked out."
"So let me get this straight," Shaftoe says, "when you really were
fucking Julieta, you said you weren't and so you were able to remain a
priest. Now you're going to marry her and not fuck her and say that you are.
"
"If you're trying to say that my relationship with the Church is very
complicated, I already knew that, Bobby."
"Let's go, then," Shaftoe says.
Shaftoe and Root haul the mortar and a boxload of bombs down onto the
beach, where they can take cover behind a stone retaining wall a good five
feet high. But the surf makes it impossible to hear anything, so Root goes
up and hides in the trees along the road, and leaves Shaftoe to fiddle with
the Soviet mortar.
There turns out to be not much fiddling necessary. An unlettered tundra
farmer with bilateral frostbite could get this thing up and running in ten
minutes. If he'd stayed up late the night before celebrating the fulfillment
of the last five year plan with a jug of wood alcohol maybe fifteen minutes.
Shaftoe consults the instructions. It does not matter that these are
printed in Russian, because they are made for illiterates anyway. A series
of parabolas is plotted out, the mortar supporting one leg and exploding
Germans supporting the opposite. Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of
shoes and he'll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the
shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he
turns into Thomas Fucking Edison. Shaftoe scans the terrain, picks out his
killing zone, then climbs up and paces off the distance, assuming one meter
per pace.
He's back down on the beach, adjusting the tube's angle, when he's
startled by a bulky form vaulting over the wall, so close it almost knocks
him down. Root's breathing fast. "Germans," he says, "coming in from the
main road."
"How do you know they're Germans? Maybe it's Otto."
"The engines sound like diesels. Huns love diesels."
"How many engines?"
"Probably two."
Root turns out to be right on the money. Two large black Mercedes issue
from the forest, like bad ideas emerging from the dim mind of a green
lieutenant. Their headlights are not illuminated. Each stops and then sits
there for a moment, then the doors open quietly, Germans climb out and stand
up. Several of them are wearing long black leather coats. Several are
carrying those keen submachine guns that are the trade mark of German
infantry, and the envy of Yanks and Tommies, who must go burdened with
primeval hunting rifles.
This is the moment, then. Nazis are right over there and it is the job
of Bobby Shaftoe, and to a lesser degree Enoch Root, to kill them all. Not
just a job but a moral requisite, because they are the living avatars of
Satan, who publicly acknowledge being just as bad and vicious as they really
are. It is a world, and a situation, to which Shaftoe and a lot of other
people are perfectly adapted. He heaves a bomb up out of the box, introduces
it to the muzzle of the fat tube, lets it go, and plugs his ears.
The mortar coughs like a kettledrum. The Germans look towards them. An
officer's monocle glints in the moonlight. A total of eight Germans have
gotten out of the cars. Three of them must be combat veterans because they
are down on their stomachs in a microsecond. The trench coated officers
remain standing, as do a couple of civilian clad goons, who immediately open
fire in their general direction with their submachine guns. This makes a lot
of noise but only impresses Shaftoe insofar as it is an impressive display
of stupidity. The bullets sail far over their heads. Before they have had
time to pepper the Gulf of Bothnia, the mortar bomb has exploded.
Shaftoe peeks over the top of the seawall. As he more or less expected,
all of the people who were standing up are now draped over the nearest
Mercedes, having been bodily lifted off their feet and flung sideways by a
moving curtain of shrapnel. But two of the survivors the veterans are belly
crawling towards Otto's cabin, whose thick log walls look extremely
reassuring in these circumstances. The third survivor is blasting away with
his submachine gun, but he has no idea where they are.
The ground is convex in a way that makes it hard to see those belly
crawling Germans. Shaftoe fires a couple more mortar rounds without much
effect. He hears the two Germans kicking down the door to Otto's cabin.
Since it is only a one room cabin, this would be a fine moment to be
armed with grenades. But Shaftoe has none, and he doesn't really want to
blow the place up anyway. "Why don't you kill the one German up there," he
tells Root, and then heads down the beach, hugging the seawall in case the
Germans are looking out the windows.
Indeed, when he's almost there the Germans smash the windows out and
begin firing in the direction of Enoch Root. Shaftoe creeps underneath the
cabin, opens the trap door, and emerges into the center of the room. The
Germans are standing there with their backs to him. He fires his Suomi into
their backs until they stop moving. Then he drags them over to the trapdoor
and dumps them down onto the beach so they won't bleed all over the floor.
The next high tide will carry them away, and with any luck they'll wash
ashore on the Fatherland in a couple weeks.
It is silent now, the way it's supposed to be at an isolated cabin by
the sea. But that doesn't mean anything. Shaftoe makes his way carefully up
into the trees and circles around behind the action, surveying the killing
zone from above. The one German is still crawling around on his elbows,
trying to figure out what's going on. Shaftoe kills him. Then he makes his
way down to the beach and finds Enoch Root bleeding into the sand. He has
taken a bullet just under the collarbone and there is a lot of blood, both
from the wound and from Root's mouth, when ever he exhales.
"I feel like I'm going to die," he says.
"Good," Shaftoe says, "that means you probably won't."
One of the Mercedes automobiles is still functional, though it has a
number of shrapnel holes and a flat tire. Shaftoe jacks it up and swaps in a
surviving tire from the other Mercedes, then drags Root over and gets him
laid out in the backseat. He drives into Norrsbruck, fast. The Mercedes is a
really great car and he wants to drive it all the way to Finland, Russia,
Siberia, down through China maybe stop for a little sushi in Shanghai then
on down through Siam and then Malaya, whence he could hop a sea gypsy's boat
to Manila, find Glory, and
The ensuing erotic reverie is cut short by the voice of Enoch Root,
bubbling through blood, or something. "Go to the church."
"Now padre, this is no time to be trying to convert me into a religious
nut. You take it easy."
"No, go now. Take me."
"What, so you can make your peace with god? Hell, Rev, you ain't gonna
die. I'll take you to the doctor's. You can go to church later."
Root drifts off into a coma, mumbling something about cigars.
Shaftoe ignores these ravings, burns rubber into Norrsbruck, and wakes
up the doctor. Then he goes and finds Otto and Julieta and takes them over
to the doctor's office. Finally, he goes round to the church and wakes up
the minister.
When they get back to the clinic, Rudolf von Hacklheber's arguing with
the doctor: Rudy (who's apparently speaking on behalf of Enoch, who can
hardly even talk) wants Enoch's wedding to Julieta to happen now, in case
Enoch dies on the table. Shaftoe is startled by how bad the patient suddenly
looks. But remembering what he and Enoch talked about earlier, he weighs in
on Rudy's side, and insists that marriage must come before surgery.
Otto produces a diamond ring literally out of his asshole he carries
valuables around in a polished metal tube shoved up his rectum and Shaftoe
serves as best man, uneasily holding that ring, still hot from Otto. Root's
too weak to thread it over Julieta's finger and so Rudy guides his hands. A
nurse serves as bridesmaid. Julieta and Enoch are joined in holy matrimony.
Root utters the words of the oath one at a time, pausing after each one to
cough blood into a stainless steel bowl. Shaftoe gets all choked up, and
actually sniffles.
The doctor etherizes Root, opens his chest, and goes in to repair the
damage. Combat surgery isn't his metier, and so he makes a few mistakes and
generally does a great job of keeping the tension level high. Some major
artery gives way, and it's necessary for Shaftoe and the minister to go out
and yank Swedes off the streets and persuade them to donate blood. Rudy is
nowhere to be found, and Shaftoe suspects for a few minutes that he has
blown town. But then suddenly he shows up at Root's bedside holding an
ancient Cuban cigar box, Spanish words all over it.
When Enoch Root dies, the only other people in the room are Rudolf von
Hacklheber, Bobby Shaftoe, and the Swedish doctor.
The doctor checks his watch, then steps out of the room.
Rudy reaches out and closes Enoch's eyes, then stands there with his
hand on the late padre's face, and looks at Shaftoe. "Go," he says, "and
make sure that the doctor files the death certificate."
In war, it happens pretty frequently that one of your buddies dies, and
you have to go right back into action, and save the waterworks for later.
"Right," Shaftoe says, and leaves the room.
The doctor's sitting in his little office, umlaut studded diplomas all
over the walls, filling out the death certificate. A skeleton dangles in one
corner. Bobby Shaftoe stands at attention on the opposite flank, he and the
skeleton sort of triangulating on the doctor and watching him scrawl out the
date and time of Enoch Root's demise.
When the doctor's finished, he leans back in his chair and rubs his
eyes.
"Can I buy you a cup of coffee?" asks Bobby Shaftoe.
"Thank you," says the doctor.
The young bride and her father are sprawled blearily in the doctor's
waiting room. Shaftoe offers to buy them coffee too. They leave Rudy to keep
watch over the body of their late friend and coconspirator, and walk down
the high street of Norrsbruck. Swedish people are beginning to come out of
their houses. They look exactly like American midwesterners, and Shaftoe's
always startled when they fail to speak English.
The doctor stops in at the courthouse to drop off the death
certificate. Otto and Julieta go on ahead to the cafe. Bobby Shaftoe loiters
outside, staring back up the street. After a minute or two he sees Rudy poke
his head out the door of the doctor's office and look one way, then the
other. He pulls his head back inside for a moment. Then he and another man
walk out of the office. The other man is wrapped in a blanket that covers
even his head. They climb into the Mercedes, Blanket Man lies down in the
back seat, and Rudy drives off in the direction of his cottage.
Bobby Shaftoe sits down in the cafe with the Finns.
"Later today I'm gonna get into that fucking Mercedes and drive into
Stockholm like a fucking bat out of hell," Shaftoe says. Though the Finns
will never appreciate it, he has chosen the "bat out of hell" phrase for a
good reason. He understands, now, why he has thought of himself as a dead
man ever since Guadalcanal. "Anyway, I hope y'all have a nice boat ride."
"Boat ride?" Otto says innocently.
"I gave you up to the Germans, just like you did to me," Shaftoe lies.
"You bastard!