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
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
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
