Cryptonomicon

The General reaches up and removes the pipe from his mouth so he can say, 'Magandang gabi.'

'You mean, 'magandang umaga,' 'Shaftoe says. 'Gabimeans nightand umagameans morning.'

The drone of airplane engines is now getting quite noticeable. The press photographers decide to pack it in, and disappear into the house.

'When you're headed north from Manila towards Lingayen and you get to the fork in the road at Tarlac and you take the right fork, there, and head across the cane breaks towards Urdaneta, what's the first village you come to?'

'It's a trick question,' Shaftoe says. 'North of Tarlac there are no cane breaks, just rice paddies.'

'Hmm. Very good,' The General says grumpily. Down below, the antiaircraft guns open up with a fantastic clattering; from this distance it sounds as if the north coast of New Guinea is being jackhammered into the sea. The General ignores it. If he were only pretendingto ignore it, he would at least lookat the incoming the Zeroes, so that he could stoppretending to ignore them when it got too dangerous. But he doesn't even do so much as look. Shaftoe forces himself not to look either. The General asks him a big long question in Spanish. He has a beautiful voice. He sounds like he is standing in an anechoic sound booth in New York City or Hollywood, narrating a newsreel about how great he is.

'If you're trying to find out if I hablo Espanol,the answer is, un poquito,'Shaftoe says.

The General cups a hand to his ear irritably. He can't hear anything except for the pair of Zeroes converging on him and Shaftoe at three hundred odd miles per hour, liquefying tons of biomass with dense streams of 12.7- millimeter slugs. He keeps a sharp eye on Shaftoe as a trail of bullets thuds across the parking lot, spraying Shaftoe's trouser legs with mud. The same line of bullets makes a sudden upwards right-angle turn when it reaches the wall of the General's house, climbs straight up the wall, tears out a chunk of the balcony's railing about a foot away from where the General's hand is resting, beats up a bunch of furniture back inside the house, and then clears the roof of the house and vanishes.

Now that the planes have passed overhead, Shaftoe can look at them without having to worry that he is giving The General the idea that he is some kind of lily-livered pansy. The meatballs on their wings broaden and glower as they bank sharply, sharper than any American plane, and come round for a second try.

'I said-' The General begins. But then the atmosphere's riven by a series of bizarre whizzing noises. One of the house's windows is suddenly punched out of its frame. Shaftoe hears a thud from inside and some crockery breaking. For the first time, The General shows some awareness that a military action is taking place. 'Warm up my jeep, Shaftoe,' he says, 'I have a bone to pick with my triple-A boys.' Then he turns around and Shaftoe gets a look at the back of his pink silk dressing gown. It is embroidered, in black thread, with a giant lizard, rampant.

The General suddenly turns around. 'Is that you screaming down there, Shaftoe?'

'Sir, no sir!'

'I distinctly heard you scream.' MacArthur turns his back on Shaftoe again, giving him another look at the lizard (which on second thought might be some sort of Chinese dragon design) and goes inside the house, mumbling irritably to himself.

Shaftoe gets into the vehicle indicated and starts the engine.

The General emerges from the house and begins to plod across the lot cradling an unexploded antiaircraft shell in his arms. The wind makes his pink silk dressing gown billow all around him.

The Zeroes come back and strafe the parking lot again, cutting a truck nearly in half. Shaftoe feels as if his intestines have dissolved and are about to spurt from his body. He closes his eyes, puckers his anal sphincter, and clenches his teeth. The General takes a seat next to him. 'Down the hill,' he orders. 'Drive towards the sound of the guns.'

They have barely gotten onto the road when their progress is blocked by the two jeeps that had been carrying all the brass up from the airfield. They now sit empty on the road, their doors hanging open, engines still running. The General reaches across in front of Shaftoe and honks the horn.

Colonels and brigadier generals begin to emerge from the shadows of the jungle, like some especially bizarre native tribe, clutching their attache cases talismanically. They salute The General, who ignores them testily. 'Move my vehicles!' he intones, jabbing at them with the stem of his pipe. 'This is the road.The parking lotis thatway.'

The Zeroes come back for a third pass. Shaftoe now realizes (as perhaps The General has) that these pilots are not the best; it is late in the war and all the good pilots are dead. Consequently they do not line their trajectories up properly with the road; the strafing trails cut across it diagonally. Still, a bullet bores through the engine block of one of the jeeps. Hot oil and steam spray out of it.

'Come on, push it out of the way!' The General says. Shaftoe instinctively begins to climb out of the jeep, but The General yanks him back with a word: 'Shaftoe! I need you to drive this vehicle.'

Wielding his pipestem like a conductor's baton, The General gets his staff back out on the road and they begin shoving the ruined jeep into the jungle. Shaftoe makes the mistake of inhaling through his nose and gets a strong diarrheal whiff-at least one of these officers has shit his pants. Shaftoe's still trying hard not to do the same, and probably would have if he'd pushed the jeep. The Zeroes are trying to line up for another strafing run, but a few American fighter planes have now appeared on the scene, which complicates matters.

Shaftoe maneuvers them through a gap between the remaining jeep and a huge tree, then guns it down the road. The General hums to himself for a while, then says, 'What's your wife's name?'

'Gory.'

'I mean, Glory.'

'Ah. Good. Good Filipina name. Filipinas are the most beautiful women in the world, don't you think?'

Experienced world traveler Bobby Shaftoe screws up his face and begins to review his experiences in a systematic way. Then he realizes that The General probably does not actually want his considered opinion.

Of course, The General's wife is American, so this could be tricky. 'I guess the woman you love is always the most beautiful,' Shaftoe finally says.

The General looks mildly pissed off. 'Of course, but...'

'But ifyou don't really give a shit about them, the Filipinas are the most beautiful, sir!' Shaftoe says.

The General nods. 'Now, your boy. What's his name, then?'

Shaftoe swallows hard and thinks fast. He doesn't even know if he hasa kid-he fabricated that to make his line sound better-and even ifhe does, the chances are only fifty-fifty that it's a boy. But if he does have a boy, he knows already what the name will be. 'His name-well, sir, his name-and I hope you don't mind this-but his name is Douglas.' The General grins delightedly and cackles, slapping the antiaircraft shell in his lap for emphasis. Shaftoe flinches.

When they arrive at the airfield, a full-fledged dogfight is in progress overhead. The place is deserted because everyone except them is hiding behind sandbags. The General has Shaftoe drive up and down the length of the field, stopping at each gun emplacement so that he can peer over the barrier.

'There's the fellow!' The General finally says, pointing his swagger stick at a gun on the opposite side of the runway. 'I just saw him poking his head out, yammering on the telephone.'

Shaftoe guns it across the runway. A flaming Zero, traveling at about half the speed of sound, impacts the runway a few hundred feet away and disintegrates into a howling cloud of burning spare parts that comes skittering and rolling and bounding across the runway in their general direction. Shaftoe falters. The General yells at him. Reckoning that he can't avoid what he can't see, Shaftoe turns into the storm. Having seen this kind of thing happen before, he knows that the first thing to come their way will be the engine block, a red-hot tombstone of fine Mitsubishi iron. And indeed there it is, one of its exhaust manifolds still dangling from it like a broken wing, spinning end-over-end and spading huge divots out of the runway with each bounce. Shaftoe swings wide around it. He identifies the fuselage and sees that it has plowed to a stop already. He looks for the wings; they broke up into a few large pieces that are slowing down rapidly, but the tires broke loose from the landing gear and are bounding along towards them, burning wheels of red fire. Shaftoe maneuvers the jeep between them, guns it across a small