Cryptonomicon

'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 Gunter'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 werefucking Julieta, you said you weren'tand so you were able to remain a priest. Now you're going to marry her and notfuck 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.