Cryptonomicon

Each one of them picks a destination on the west bank and tells everyone else what it is, so that they won't converge on the same place, and then each begins probing his or her way towards it. Randy tries to resist the temptation to look up. He says, after about fifteen minutes: "I know what's going on with the explosions. Wing's people are tunneling their way toward Golgotha. They're going to remove the gold through some kind of an underground conduit. It'll look like they are excavating it from their own property. But they'll actually be taking it from here."

Amy grins. "They're robbing the bank."

Randy nods, mildly annoyed that she's not taking it more seriously. "Wing must have been too busy with the Long March and the Great Leap Forward to buy this real estate when it was available," Enoch says.

A few minutes later, Doug Shaftoe says, "To what extent do you give a shit, Randy?"

"What do you mean?"

"Would you be willing to die to prevent Wing from getting that gold?"

"Probably not."

"Would you be willing to kill?"

"Well," says Randy, a bit taken aback, "I said I wouldn't be willing to die. So--"

"Don't give me that golden rule shit," Doug says. "If someone broke into your house in the middle of the night and threatened your family, and you had a shotgun in your hands, would you use it?"

Randy involuntarily looks towards Amy. Because this is not only an ethical conundrum. It's also a test to determine whether Randy is fit to be Doug's daughter's husband, and the father of his grandchildren. "Well, I should hope so," Randy says. Amy's pretending not to listen.

The water all around them makes a spattering, searing noise. Everyone cringes. Then they realize that a handful of small pebbles was tossed into the water from above. They look up at the rim of the overhang, and see a 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."