The sun is going down and the rats are waking up. The major has been clambering over docks all day long. He has seen enough of war and the military to know that what he is looking for will be found on the last pier that he searches, which happens to be this one. If he begins searching that pier at the near end, what he is looking for will be at the far end, and vice versa. All the more reason to stay sharp as he works his way along. After casting an eye around to make sure there are no leaking stacks of drums of aviation fuel nearby, he lights up a cigarette. War is hell, but smoking cigarettes makes it all worthwhile.
Sydney Harbor is beautiful at sunset, but he’s been looking at it all day and can’t really see it anymore. For lack of anything better to do, he opens up his briefcase. There’s a paperback novel in there, which he’s already read. And there is a clipboard which contains, in yellowed, crackling, sedimentary layers, a fossil record that only an archaeologist could unravel. It is the story of how The General, just after he got out of Corregidor and reached Australia in April, sent out a request for some stuff. How that request got forwarded to America and bounced pinball-like through the cluttered infinitude of America’s military and civilian bureaucracies; how the stuff in question was duly manufactured, procured, trucked hither and yon, and caused to be placed on a ship; and finally, some evidence to the effect that said ship was in Sydney Harbor several months ago. There’s no evidence that this ship ever unloaded the stuff in question, but unloading stuff is what ships always do when they reach port and so Comstock is going with that assumption for a while.
After Major Comstock finishes his cigarette, he resumes his search. Some of the papers on his clipboard specify certain magic numbers that ought to be stenciled on the outside of the crates in question; at least, that’s what he’s been assuming since he started this search at daybreak, and if he’s wrong, he’ll have to go back and search every crate in Sydney Harbor again. Actually getting a look at each crates’ numbers means squeezing his body through narrow channels between crate piles and rubbing away the grease and grime that obscures the crucial data. The major is now as filthy as any combat grunt.
When he gets close to the end of the pier, his eye picks out one cluster of crates that appear to be all of the same vintage insofar as their salt encrustations are of similar thickness. Down low where the rain pools, their rough-sawn wood has rotted. Up where it is roasted by the sun, it has warped and split. Somewhere these crates must have numbers stenciled onto them, but something else has caught his eye, something that stirs Comstock’s heart, just as the sight of the Stars and Stripes fluttering in the morning sun might do for a beleaguered infantryman. Those crates are proudly marked with the initials of the company that Major Comstock (and most of his comrades-in-arms up in Brisbane) worked for, before they were shunted, en masse, into the Army’s Signal Intelligence Service. The letters are faded and grimy, but he would recognize them anywhere in the world: they form the logo, the corporate identity, the masthead, of ETC—the Electrical Till Corporation.
CRYPT
* * *
THE TERMINAL IS SUPPOSED TO ECHO THE LINES OF A row of Malay longhouses jammed together side by side. A freshly painted jetway gropes out like a giant lamprey and slaps its neoprene lips onto the side of the plane. The elderly Nipponese tour group makes no effort to leave the plane, respectfully leaving the aisles clear for the businessmen: You go ahead, the people we’re going to visit won’t mind waiting.
On his march up the jetway, humidity and jet fuel condense onto Randy’s skin in equal measure, and he begins to sweat. Then he’s in the terminal, which notwithstanding the Malay longhouses allusion has been engineered specifically to look like any other brand-new airport terminal in the world. The air-conditioning hits like a spike through the head. He puts his bags down on the floor and stands there for a moment, collecting his wits beneath a Leroy Neiman painting the dimensions of a volleyball court, depicting the sultan in action on a polo pony. Trapped in a window seat during a short and choppy flight, he had never made it out to the lavatory, so he goes to one now and pees so hard that the urinal emits a sort of yodeling noise.
As he steps back, perfectly satisfied, he becomes conscious of a man backing away from an adjacent urinal—one of the Nipponese businessmen who just got off the plane. A couple of months ago, the presence of this man would have ruled out Randy’s taking a leak at all. Today, he didn’t even notice that the guy was there. As a longtime bashful kidney sufferer, Randy is delighted to have stumbled upon the magic remedy: not to convince yourself that you are a dominating Alpha Male, but rather to be too lost in your thoughts to notice other people around you. Bashful kidney is your body’s way of telling you that you’re thinking too hard, that you need to get off the campus and go get a fucking job.
“You were looking at the Ministry of Information site?” the businessman says. He is in a perfect charcoal-grey pinstripe suit, which he wears just as easily and comfortably as Randy does his souvenir t-shirt from the fifth Hackers Conference, surfer’s jams, and Teva sandals.
“Oh!” Randy blurts, annoyed with himself. “I completely forgot to look for it.” Both men laugh. The Nipponese man produces a business card with some deft sleight-of-hand. Randy has to rip open his nylon-and-velcro wallet and delve for his. They exchange cards in the traditional Asian two-handed style, which Avi has forced Randy to practice until he gets it nearly right. They bow at each other, triggering howls from the nearest couple of computerized self-flushing urinals. The bathroom door swings open and an aged Nip wanders in, a precursor of the silver horde.
Nip is the word used by Sergeant Sean Daniel McGee, U.S. Army, Retired, to refer to Nipponese people in his war memoir about Kinakuta, a photocopy of which document Randy is carrying in his bag. It is a terrible racist slur. On the other hand, people call British people Brits, and Yankees Yanks, all the time. Calling a Nipponese person a Nip is just the same thing, isn’t it? Or is it tantamount to calling a Chinese person a Chink? During the hundreds of hours of meetings, and megabytes of encrypted e-mail messages, that Randy, Avi, John Cantrell, Tom Howard, Eberhard Föhr, and Beryl have exchanged, getting Epiphyte(2) off the ground, each of them has occasionally, inadvertently, used the word Jap as shorthand for Japanese—in the same way as they used RAM to mean Random Access Memory. But of course Jap is a horrible racist slur too. Randy figures it all has to do with your state of mind at the time you utter the word. If you’re just trying to abbreviate, it’s not a slur. But if you are fomenting racist hatreds, as Sean Daniel McGee occasionally seems to be not above doing, that’s different.
This particular Nipponese individual is identified, on his card, as GOTO Furudenendu (“Ferdinand Goto”). Randy, who has spent a lot of time recently puzzling over organizational charts of certain important Nipponese corporations, knows already that he is a vice president for special projects (whatever that means) at Goto Engineering. He also knows that organizational charts of Nipponese companies are horseshit and that job titles mean absolutely nothing. That he has the same surname as the guy who founded the company is presumably worth taking note of.
Randy’s card says that he is Randall L. WATERHOUSE (“Randy”) and that he is vice president for network technology development at Epiphyte Corporation.
Goto and Waterhouse stroll out of the washroom and start to follow the baggage-claim icons that are strung across the terminal like breadcrumbs. “You have jet lag now?” Goto asks brightly—following (Randy assumes) a script from an English textbook. He’s a handsome guy with a winning smile. He’s probably in his forties, though Nipponese people seem to have a whole different aging algorithm so this might be way off.
“No,” Randy answers. Being a nerd, he answers such questions badly, succinctly, and truthfully. He knows that Goto essentially does not care whether Randy has jet lag or not. He is vaguely conscious that Avi, if he were here, would use Goto’s question as it was intended—as an opening for cheery social batter. Until he reached thirty, Randy felt bad about the fact th
at he was not socially deft. Now he doesn’t give a damn. Pretty soon he’ll probably start being proud of it. In the meantime, just for the sake of the common enterprise, he tries his best. “I’ve actually been in Manila for several days, so I’ve had plenty of time to adjust.”
“Ah! Did your activities in Manila go well?” Goto fires back.
“Yes, very well, thank you,” Randy lies, now that his social skills, such as they are, have had a moment to get unlimbered. “Did you come directly from Tokyo?”
Goto’s smile freezes in place for a moment, and he hesitates before saying, “Yes.”
This is, at root, a patronizing reply. Goto Engineering is headquartered in Kobe and they would not fly out of the Tokyo airport. Goto said yes anyway, because, during that moment of hesitation, he realized that he was just dealing with a Yank, who, when he said “Tokyo,” really meant “the Nipponese home islands” or “wherever the hell you come from.”
“Excuse me,” Randy says, “I meant to say Osaka.”
Goto grins brilliantly and seems to execute a tiny suggestion of a bow. “Yes! I came from Osaka today.”
Goto and Waterhouse drift apart from each other at the luggage claim, exchange grins as they breeze through immigration, and run into each other at the ground transportation section. Kinakutan men in brilliant white quasinaval uniforms with gold braid and white gloves are buttonholing passengers, proffering transportation to the local hotels.
“You are staying at the Foote Mansion also?” Goto says. That being the luxury hotel in Kinakuta. But he knows the answer already—tomorrow’s meeting has been planned as exhaustively as a space shuttle launch.
Randy hesitates. The largest Mercedes-Benz he’s ever seen has just pulled up to the curb, condensed moisture not merely fogging its windows but running down them in literal streamlines. A driver in Foote Mansion livery has erupted from it to divest Mr. Goto of his luggage. Randy knows that he need only make a subtle move toward that car and he will be whisked to a luxury hotel where he can take a shower, watch TV naked while drinking a hundred-dollar bottle of French wine, go swimming, get a massage.
Which is precisely the problem. He can already feel himself wilting in the equatorial heat. It’s too early to go soft. He’s only been awake for six or seven hours. There’s work to be done. He forces himself to stand up at attention, and the effort makes him break a sweat so palpably that he almost expects to moisten everything within a radius of several meters. “I would enjoy sharing a ride to the hotel with you,” he says, “but I have one or two errands to run first.”
Goto understands. “Perhaps drinks this evening.”
“Leave me a message,” Randy says. Then Goto’s waving at him through the smoked glass of the Mercedes as it pulls seven gees away from the curb. Randy does a one-eighty, goes back inside to the halal Dunkin’ Donuts, which accepts eight currencies, and sates himself. Then he 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 cellphone, 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 boardwalk 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 bears 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.