Cryptonomicon

Ultra. He thinks we're going to blow his secret and ruin it for him because he thinks we're idiots.' The major takes a very deep lungful of smoke, sits back in his chair, and carefully puffs out a couple of smoke rings. It is a convincing display of insouciance. 'So he's always nagging Marshall to tighten up security, and Marshall throws him a bone every so often, just to keep the Alliance on an even keel.' For the first time, the major looks Waterhouse in the eye. 'You happen to be the latest bone. That's all.'

There is a long silence, as if Waterhouse is expected to say something.

He clears his throat. No one ever got court-martialed for following his orders. 'My orders state that-'

'Fuck your orders, Captain Waterhouse,' the major says.

There is a long silence. The major tends to one or two other distracting duties. Then he stares out the window for a few moments, trying to compose his thoughts. Finally he says, 'Get this through your head. We are not idiots. The General is not an idiot. The General appreciates Ultra as much as Sir Winston Churchill. The General uses Ultra as well as any commander in this war.'

'Ultra's no good if the Japanese learn about it.'

'As you can appreciate, the General does not have time to meet with you personally. Neither does his staff. So you will not have an opportunity to instruct him on how to keep Ultra a secret,' says the major. He glances down a couple of times at a sheet of paper on his blotter, and indeed he is now speaking like a man who is reading a prepared statement. 'From time to time, since we learned that you were being sent to us, your existence has been brought to the General's attention. During the brief periods of time when he is not occupied with more pressing matters, he has occasionally voiced some pithy thoughts about you, your mission, and the masterminds who sent you here.'

'No doubt,' Waterhouse says.

'The general is of the opinion that persons not familiar with the unique features of the Southwest Pacific Theater may not be entirely competent to judge his strategy,' says the major. 'The General feels that the Nips will never learn about Ultra. Never. Why? Because they are incapable of comprehending what has happened to them. The General has speculated that he could go down to the radio station tomorrow and broadcast a speech announcing that we had broken all of the Nip codes and were reading all of their messages, and nothing would happen. The General's words were something to the effect that the Nips will never believe how totally we have fucked them, because when you get fucked that badly, it's your own goddamn fucking fault and it makes you look like a fucking shithead.'

'I see,' Waterhouse says.

'But The General said all of that at much greater length and without using a single word of profanity, because that is how The General expresses himself.'

'Thank you for boiling it down,' Waterhouse says.

'You know those white headbands that the Nips tie around their foreheads? With the meatball and the Nip characters printed on them?'

'I've seen pictures of them.'

'I've seen them for real, tied around the heads of pilots of Nip fighter planes that were about fifty feet away firing machine guns at me and my men,' says the major.

'Oh, yeah! Me too. At Pearl Harbor,' Waterhouse says. 'I forgot.'

This appears to be the most irritating thing that Waterhouse has said all day. The major has to spend a moment composing himself. 'That headband is called a hachimaki.'

'Imagine this, Waterhouse. The emperor is meeting with his general staff. All of the top generals and admirals in Nippon parade into the room in full dress uniforms and bow down solemnly before the emperor. They have come to report on the progress of the war. Each of these generals and admirals is wearing a brand-new hachimakiaround his forehead. These hachimakisare printed with phrases saying things like, 'I am a dipshit' and 'Through my personal incompetence I killed two hundred thousand of our own men' and 'I handed our Midway plans over to Nimitz on a silver platter.'

The major now pauses and takes a phone call so that Waterhouse can savor this image for a while. Then he hangs up, lights another cigarette, and continues. 'That's what it would look like for the Nips to admit at this point in the war that we have Ultra.'

More smoke rings. Waterhouse has nothing to say. So the major continues. 'See, we've gone over the watershed line of this war. We won Midway. We won North Africa. Stalingrad. The Battle of the Atlantic. Everything changes when you go over the watershed line. The rivers all flow a different direction. It's as if the force of gravity itself has changed and is now working in our favor. We've adjusted to that. Marshall and Churchill and all those others are still stuck in an obsolete mentality. They are defenders. But The General is not a defender. As a matter of fact, just between you and me, The General is lousy on defense, as he demonstrated in the Philippines. The General is a conqueror.

'Well,' Waterhouse finally says, 'what do you suggest I do with myself, seeing as how I'm here in Brisbane?'

'I'm tempted to say you should connect up with all of the other Ultra security experts Marshall sent out before you, and get a bridge group together,' the major says.

'I don't care for bridge,' Waterhouse says politely.

'You're supposed to be some expert codebreaker, right?'

'Right.'

'Why don't you go to Central Bureau. The Nips have a zillion different codes and we haven't broken all of them yet.'

'That's not my mission.'

'You don't worry about your fucking mission,' the major says. 'I'll make sure that Marshall thinks you're doing your mission, because if Marshall doesn't think that, he'll give us no end of hassles. So you're clean with the higher-ups.'

'Thank you.'

'You can consider your mission accomplished,' the major says. 'Congratulations.'

'Thank you.'

'My mission is to beat the stuffing out of the fucking Nips, and that mission is notaccomplished just yet, and so I have other matters to attend to,' the major says significantly.

'Shall I just see myself out then?' Waterhouse asks.

Chapter 55 DONITZ

Once, when Bobby Shaftoe was eight years old, he went to Tennessee to visit Grandma and Grandpa. One boring afternoon he began skimming a letter that the old lady had left lying on an end table. Grandma gave him a stern talking to and then recounted the incident to Grandpa, who recognized his cue and gave him forty whacks. That and a whole series of roughly parallel childhood experiences, plus several years in the Marine Corps, have made him into one polite fellow.

So he doesn't read others' mail. It be against the rules.

But here he is. The setting: a plank-paneled room above a pub in Norrsbruck, Sweden. The pub is a sailorly kind of place, catering to fishermen, which makes it congenial for Shaftoe's friend and drinking buddy: Kapitanleutnant Gunter Bischoff, Kriegsmarine of the Third Reich (retired).

Bischoff gets a lot of interesting mail, and leaves it strewn all over the room. Some of the mail is from his family in Germany, and contains money. Consequently Bischoff, unlike Shaftoe, will not have to work even if this war continues, and he remains in Sweden cooling his boilers for another ten years.

Some of the mail is from the crew of U-691, according to Bischoff. After Bischoff got them all here to Norrsbruck in one piece, his second in-command, Oberleutnant zur See Karl Beck, cut a deal with the Kriegsmarine in which the crew were allowed to return to Germany, no hard feelings, no repercussions. All of them except for Bischoff climbed on board what was left of U-691 and steamed off in the direction of Kiel.

Only days later, the mail began to pour in. Every member of the crew, to a man, sent Bischoff a letter