Cryptonomicon

'In the fool's vault.'

It takes them several minutes to pick their way through the main vault, because it is packed with treasure. The starry core of a galaxy must look like this. They clamber up the shaft in its ceiling and make their way to the Hall of Glory. Goto Dengo finds the bare wires that lead to the electric light bulb and attaches them to the screw terminals on a battery. Running at the wrong voltage, the bulb looks like a tangerine floating in ink.

'Shut off your headlamps,' Goto Dengo says, 'to conserve fuel. I will leave mine burning in case there is an interruption in the power.'

He pulls a fistful of white cotton from a sterile box. It is the cleanest whitest thing he has seen in several years. He pulls it apart into smaller wads, like Father Ferdinand breaking the bread of the mass, and passes them out to the men, who stuff it ritualistically into their ears. 'There is no more time to waste,' he hollers, 'Captain Noda must be growing impatient out there.'

'Sir!' one of the men says, standing at attention and handing him a pair of wires marked MAIN TUNNEL DEMOLITION.

'Very well,' Goto Dengo says, and screws the wires down to a pair of terminals on a wooden switch box.

It seems as though he should say something ceremonious, but nothing comes to mind. Nipponese men are dying all over the Pacific without first getting to make speeches.

He clenches his teeth together, shuts his eyes, and twists the switch handle.

The shock wave comes through the floor first, whacking the soles of their feet like a flying plank. A moment later it comes through the air and strikes them like a moving wall of stone. The cotton in the ears seems to accomplish nothing. Goto Dengo feels his eyes bounce off the backs of their sockets. All of his teeth feel as though they have been crisply sheared off at the gumline with cold chisels. The wind is all forced out of his lungs. They are empty for the first time since the moment of his birth. Like newborn infants, he and the other men can only writhe and look around themselves in a panic until their bodies learn how to draw breath again.

One of the men brought a bottle of sake, which has shattered. They pass around the jagged bottom of the bottle, each man taking a gulp of what remains. Goto Dengo tries to pull the cotton out of his ears and finds that the shock wave drove it in so deep that it cannot be extracted. So he merely shouts: 'Check your watches.' They all do. 'In two hours, Captain Noda will demolish the plug on the bottom of the lake and flood the water traps. In the meantime, we have work to do. You all know your jobs-get to work!'

They all hai,turn on their heels, and go their separate ways. It is the first time that Goto Dengo has actually sent men off to their deaths. But they are all dead men anyway, and so he doesn't know how to feel about it.

If he still believed in the emperor-still believed in the war-he would think nothing of it. But if he still believed, he wouldn't be doing what he is about to do.

It is important to keep up the appearance that this is a normal operation, and so he descends to the vault to perform his next scheduled duty: inspect what used to be the main drift. The vault is filled with a fog of rock dust around which his windpipe clenches like a fist grabbing a rope. His acetylene lamp only makes the dust glow, giving him a visibility of perhaps six inches. All he can see is the bullion right in front of his face, which still glimmers beneath a film of dust and smoke. The shock wave has deranged his formerly neat stacks of crates and bricks and turned the entire hoard into a rude mound that is still shedding avalanches, seeking its angle of repose. A 75- kilogram gold brick slides down the pile like a runaway boxcar, emerging suddenly from the cloud of dust, and he jumps out of its way. Bits of rock are still sifting down from the crazed ceiling and plinking against his helmet.

He scrambles carefully over the heap, breathing through a wad of cotton, until he can see what used to be the main drift. The dynamite has done the right thing: shattered the roof of the drift into billions of shards. Collapsed on the floor, they occupy a larger volume than the same mass of stone did when it was all in one piece. The drift is filled with tons of loose stone, all the way down to the entrance along the Tojo River, where Captain Noda's men are at work even now, concealing the tiny puncture wound behind river rocks.

He feels, rather than hears, a small explosion, and knows that some thing is going wrong. No one should be setting off explosions now.

Movement in this place is agonizingly slow, like a nightmare when you are trying to run away from a demon. It takes him so long to get back to the Hall of Glory that there is almost no point in doing it; whatever was happening is over when he arrives.

What he sees, when he arrives, is a group of three men waiting for him: Wing, Rodolfo, and the Filipino named Bong.

'The soldiers?'

'All dead,' Rodolfo says flatly, irritated by the stupidity of the question.

'The others?'

'One soldier set off a grenade. Killed himself and my two men, Wing says.

'Another soldier heard the grenade and had a knife ready when Agustin came for him,' Bong says. He shakes his head sorrowfully. 'I think that Agustin was not ready to kill a man. He hesitated.'

Goto Dengo stares at Bong, fascinated. 'And you?'

Bong doesn't understand the question for a moment. Then light dawns. 'Oh, no, I did not hesitate, Lieutenant Goto. A Nipponese soldier hurt my sister one time, in a very inappropriate way.'

Goto Dengo stands there silently for a while, until he notices that the other men are all looking at him expectantly. Then he checks his watch. He is shocked to see that only half an hour has gone by since he set off the dynamite.

'We have an hour and a half before the water traps are flooded. If we are not in the Bubble by then, we will be sealed off, with no escape possible,' says Goto Dengo.

'We go there and wait,' Wing suggests, in Shanghainese.

'No. Captain Noda listens, outside, for more explosions,' Goto Dengo says, also in Chinese; then, in English, tells the Filipinos, 'We have to set off the demolition charges at certain times or Noda-san will grow suspicious.'

'Whoever sets them off will be trapped forever in this chamber,' Rodolfo says, gesturing around them at the Hall of Glory.

'We will not set them off from here,' says Goto Dengo, pulling the lid from a crate. Inside are several long coils of two-stranded telephone wire. He hands the coils out to Rodolfo, Wing, and Bong. They understand, and begin to splice the new wires onto the ones that terminate here.

They retreat through Golgotha in stages, lugging battery packs with them and unrolling the wires as they go, dynamiting the tunnel sections behind them one by one. As they do this, certain oddities of the tunnel system finally become clear to Rodolfo, Wing, and Bong. It becomes fully evident to them, for the first time, that the entire complex was carefully designed by Goto Dengo to serve two entirely contradictory purposes. To a loyal Nipponese engineer like Captain Noda it looks like precisely what he was ordered to build: a vault laced with booby traps. But to the four men sealed inside, Golgotha has a second function. It is an escape machine. As the purposes of certain rooms, drifts, and other features suddenly become clear, they straighten up, blinking, and turn to look at Goto Dengo, with the same expressions as the soldiers wore, weeks ago, when they discovered the Buddha in the Mercedes.

Their destination is the Bubble, a niche that Goto Dengo had them carve out of the stone during the last couple of months. He claimed, to anyone who asked, that it was a water reservoir, put there to increase the deadliness of one of the traps. It is a wide vertical shaft, four meters in diameter, that begins in the ceiling of a peripheral drift and goes straight up for a few meters, then dead-ends. Ladders still cling to its walls, and by ascending, they can reach a rock ledge big enough to sit on. Canteens of water and boxes of biscuits have already been stocked here by Wing and his men.

By the time they reach their seats in the top of the Bubble, all of the others are in awe of Goto Dengo, and ready to do whatever he says. He senses this. It fills him with unutterable misery.

They have fifteen minutes to wait. The others spend it sipping water and nibbling biscuits. Goto Dengo fills it with self-recrimination. 'I am a loathsome worm,' he says, 'a traitor, a filthy piece of dog shit, not worthy to clean out the latrines of true soldiers of Nippon. I am bereft-totally cut off from the nation I've betrayed. I am now part of a world of people who hate Nippon-and who therefore hate me-but at the same time I am hateful to my own kind. I will stay here and die.'