Cryptonomicon

tiny, reciprocating movement: Jackie Woo, standing on the top of the bank, waving his hand at them.

'My eyes are going,' Doug says. 'Does he look intact to you?'

'Yes!' Amy says. She beams-her pearlies are very white in the sun-and waves back.

Jackie's grinning. He's carrying a long, muddy rod in one hand: his mine probe. In the other, he's got a dirty canister about the size of a clay pigeon. He holds it up and waggles it in the air. 'Nip mine!' he shouts gleefully.

'Well, put it the fuck down, you asshole!' Doug hollers, 'after all these years it's going to be incredibly unstable.' Then he gets a look of incredulous confusion. 'Who the hell set off the other mine if it wasn't you? Someone was screaming up there.'

'I haven't found him,' Jackie Woo says. 'He stopped screaming.'

'Do you think he's dead?'

'No.'

'Did you hear any other voices?'

'No.'

'Jesus Christ,' Doug says, 'someone's been shadowing us the whole way.' He turns around and looks up at the opposite bank, where John Wayne has now probed his way to the edge and is taking this all in. Some kind of hand gesture passes between them (they brought walkie talkies, but Doug scorns them as a crutch for lightweights and wannabes). John Wayne settles down onto his belly and gets out a pair of binoculars with objective lenses as big as saucers and begins scanning Jackie Woo's side.

The group in the riverbed probes onwards in silence for a while. None of them can figure out what is going on, and so it's good that they have this mine-probing thing to keep their hands and minds busy. Randy's probe hits something flexible, buried a couple of inches deep in silt and gravel. He flinches so hard he almost topples back on his ass, and spends a minute or two trying to get his composure back. The silt gives everything the blank but suggestive look of sheet-covered corpses. Trying to identify the shapes makes his mind tired. He clears some gravel aside and runs his hand lightly over this thing. Dead leaves tumble through the water and tickle his forearms. 'Got an old tire down here,' he says. 'Big. Truck-sized. And bald as an egg.'

Every so often a colored bird will descend from the shade of the overhanging jungle and flash into the sun, never failing to scare the shit out of them. The sun is brutal. Randy was only a few yards away from the shade of the bank when all of this started, and now he's pretty sure that he's going to pass out from sunstroke before he gets there.

Enoch Root starts muttering in Latin at one point. Randy looks over at him and sees that he's holding up a dripping, muddy human skull.

An irridescent bright blue bird with a yellow scimitar beak mounted in a black-and-orange head shoots out of the jungle, seizes control of a nearby rock, and cocks its head at him. The earth shakes again; Randy flinches and a bead curtain of sweat falls out of his eyebrows.

'Down under the rocks and mud there's reinforced concrete,' Doug says. 'I can see the rebar sticking out.'

Another bird or something flashes out of the shadows, headed nearly straight down toward the water at tremendous speed. Amy makes a funny grunting sound. Randy's just turning to look her way when a tremendous, hammering racket opens up from above. He looks up to see a blossom of flame strobing out of the slotted flash arrestor on the muzzle of John Wayne's assault rifle. Seems like he's shooting directly across the river. Jackie Woo gets off a few shots too. Randy, who's squatting, loses his balance from all of this head-turning and has to put out a hand to steady himself, which fortunately doesn't come down on top of a mine. He looks over at Amy; only her head and shoulders are showing out of the water, and she's staring at nothing in particular, with a look in her eyes that Randy doesn't like at all. He rises to his feet and takes a step towards her.

'Randy, don't do that,' says Doug Shaftoe. Doug has already reached the shade, and is only a couple of paces from the curtain of vegetation that hangs over the riverbank.

There is a piece of debris riding on the surface of the river not far from Amy's face, but it is not being moved by the current. It moves when Amy moves. Randy takes another step towards her, putting his foot down on a big silt-covered boulder whose top he can make out through the milky water. He squats on that boulder like a bird and focuses again on Amy, who is maybe fifteen feet away from him. John Wayne fires a series of individual shots from his rifle. Randy realizes that the piece of debris is made of feathers, bound to the butt of a narrow stick.

'Amy's been shot with an arrow,' Randy says.

'Well that's just fucking great,' Doug mutters.

'Amy, where are you hit?' says Enoch Root.

Amy still can't seem to speak. She stands up awkwardly, doing all the work with her left leg, and as she rises the arrow emerges from the water and turns out to be lodged squarely in the middle of her right thigh. The wound is washed clean at first but then blood wells out from around the arrow's shaft and begins to patrol down her leg in bifurcating streams.

Doug's engaged in some furious exchange of hand signals with the men up above. 'You know,' he whispers, 'I can tell that this is one of those classic deals where what was supposed to be a simple reconnaissance suddenly turns into the actual battle.'

Amy grabs the shaft of the arrow with both hands and tries to snap it, but the wood is green, and won't break cleanly. 'I dropped my knife somewhere,' she says. Her voice sounds calm, putting some effort into making it that way. 'I think I can deal with this level of pain for a little,' she says. 'But I don't like it at all.'

Near Amy, Randy can see another silt-covered boulder near the surface, maybe six feet away. He gathers himself and leaps towards it. But it topples under the impact of his foot and sends him splashing full-length into the streambed. When he sits up and gets a look at it, the boulder turns out to be a squat cylindrical object about as big around as a dinner plate and several inches thick.

'Randy, what you're looking at is a Nip anti-tank mine,' Doug says. 'It is highly unstable with age, and it contains enough high explosive to essentially decapitate everyone in our little group here. So if you could just stop being a complete asshole for a little bit, I'm sure that we would all appreciate it very much.'

Amy shows Randy the palm of one hand. 'I'm not looking for you to prove anything,' she says. 'If you're trying to say you love me, send me a fucking valentine.'

'I love you,' Randy says. 'I want you to be okay. I want you to marry me.'

'Well, that's very romantic,' Amy says, sarcastically, and then starts crying.

'Oh, Jesus Christ,' Doug Shaftoe says. 'You guys can do this later! Will you ease up? Whoever fired that arrow is long gone. The Huks are guerrillas. They know how to make themselves scarce.'

'It wasn't fired by a Huk,' Randy says. 'Huks have guns. Even I know that.'

'Who fired it, then?' Amy asks, working hard to get her composure back.

'It looks like a Cayuse arrow,' Randy says.

'Cayuse? You think it was fired by a Cayuse?' Doug demands. Randy admires that Doug, while skeptical, is essentially open to the idea.

'No,' Randy says, taking another step towards Amy, and straddling the antitank mine. 'The Cayuse are extinct. Measles. So it was made by a white man who is an expert in the hunting practices of Northwest Indian tribes. What else do we know about him? That's he's really good at sneaking around in the jungle. And that he's so totally fucking crazy that even when he's been injured by a land mine, he's still crawling around in the undergrowth taking shots at people.' Randy's probing the riverbed as he's talking, and now he takes another step. Only six feet away from Amy now. 'Not just anyone-he took a shot at Amy. Why? Because he's been watching. He saw Amy sitting next to me when we took that break, resting her head on my shoulder. He knows that if he wants to hurt me, the best thing he could possibly do is take a shot at her.'

'Why does he want to hurt you?' Enoch asks.

'Because he's evil.'

Enoch looks tremendously impressed.

'Well, who the hell is it?' Amy hisses. She's irritated now, which he takes to be a good sign.

'His name is Andrew Loeb,' Randy says. 'And Jackie Woo and John Wayne are never going to find him.'

'Jackie and John are very good,' Doug demurs.

Another step. He can almost reach out and touch Amy. 'That's the problem,' Randy says. 'They're way too