Cryptonomicon

They come around a gentle bend in the river and are confronted by a waterfall some twenty meters high. At the base of the falls there's a still and relatively shallow pool, filling the bottom of a broad melon-shaped cavity formed by the concave, overhanging banks. The vertical sun beams straight down on the cloud of white foam at the base of the falls, which radiates the light back at blinding power, forming a sort of natural light fixture that illuminates the whole inside of the cavity. The stone walls, sweating and dripping and running with groundwater, glisten in its light. The undersides of the ferns and big-leaved plants--epiphytes--sprouting from invisible footholds in the walls flicker and dapple in the weirdly bluish foam-glow.

Most of the cavity's walls are hidden behind vegetation: fragile, cascading veils of moss growing from the rock, and vines depending from the branches of the trees hundreds of feet above them and dangling halfway down into the gorge, where they have become entangled with protruding tree roots and formed a natural trellis for a finer network of creepers that is itself the warp and woof of a matted carpet of moss saturated with flowing ground water. The gorge is alive with butterflies burning with colors of radioactive purity, and down closer to the rustling water are damselflies, mostly black with aqua bodies that flash in the sun--their wings revealing glimpses of salmon and coral-red on the underside as they orbit around each other. But mostly the air is filled with this continual slow progress of things that didn't survive, making their way down through the column of air and into the water, which flushes them away: dead leaves and the exoskeletons of insects, sucked dry and eviscerated in some silent combat hundreds of feet above their heads.

Randy's keeping an eye on the display of his GPS, which has been having a hard time locking onto any satellites down in this gorge. But finally some numbers come up. He has it calculate the distance from here to Golgotha, and the answer comes up immediately: a long row of zeroes with a few insignificant digits trailing off the end.

Randy says, "This is it." But most of what he says is obscured by a sharp explosion from high above them on the bank. A few seconds later, a man begins to scream.

"No one move," says Doug Shaftoe, "we are in a minefield."

Chapter 98 CRIBS

On a grassy knoll, a man crouches behind a tombstone, peering through a telescope on a tripod, and tracking the steady pace of a robed and hooded figure across the grass.

FUNERAL. That's the crib that broke these guys.

The Nipponese man in the American uniform, whom Enoch Root is leaving behind, must be that Goto Dengo fella. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse has seen that name punched on so many ETC cards that he no longer even has to read the printed letters at the top of the card: he can identify a "Goto Dengo" from arm's length simply by glancing at the pattern of punched-out rectangles. The same is true of some two dozen other Nipponese mining engineers and surveyors who were brought to Luzon in '43 and '44, in response to Azure/Pufferfish messages emanating from Tokyo. But, as far as Waterhouse can tell, all of the others are dead. Either that, or they retreated north with Yamashita.

Only one of them is alive, well, and living in what is left of Manila, and that's Goto Dengo. Waterhouse was going to rat him out to Army Intelligence, but that doesn't seem like such a good idea now that the unkillable Nip engineer has become a personal protegé of The General.

Root is heading in the direction of those two mysterious white men who attended Bobby Shaftoe's funeral. Waterhouse peers at them through the scope, but mediocre optics, combined with the heat waves rising from the grass, complicate this. One of them seems oddly familiar. Odd because Waterhouse doesn't know that many bearded men with long swept-back blond hairdoes and black eyepatches.

An idea springs out of his forehead fully formed, with no warning. This is how all the best ideas arrive. Ideas that he patiently cultivates from tiny seeds always fail to germinate or else grow up into monstrosities. Good ideas are just there all of a sudden, like angels in the Bible. You cannot ignore them just because they are ridiculous. Waterhouse stifles a giggle and tries not to get overly excited. The dull, tedious, bureaucratic part of his mind is feeling testy, and wants a few shreds of supporting evidence.