Cryptonomicon

When he has picked himself up off the deck, and his ears have stopped ringing, Bischoff says, "Take her down to seventy-five meters."

The dial that tells their depth says twenty. Somewhere, perhaps a hundred meters above them, crewmen of a circling bomber are setting their depth charges to explode when they have sunk to a depth of twenty, and so twenty is a bad place to be for a while.

The dial does not move, though, and Bischoff has to repeat the command. Everyone on the boat must be deaf.

Either that, or the V-Million has sustained damage to her dive planes. Bischoff presses his skull against a bulkhead, and even though his ears don't work so well anymore, he can feel the whine of the turbines. At least they have power. They can move.

But Catalinas can move faster.

Say what you want about those old, clanking diesel U-boats, they at least had guns on them. You could surface, and go out on the decks in the sun and the air, and fight back. But in the V-Million, this swimming rocket, the only weapon is secrecy. In the Baltic, fine. But this is the Mindoro Strait, which is an ocean of window-glass. V-Million might as well be suspended in midair from piano wires, searchlights crossing on it.

The needle on the dial is moving now, passing down through twenty-five meters. The deck twists under Bischoff's feet as she recoils from another depth charge. But he can tell from the way it twists that this one has detonated too high to deal serious damage. From habit he glances at the dial that tells their speed, and notes it down along with the time: 1746 hours. The sun must be lower and lower in the sky, its light glancing off the tops of the waves, forcing the pilots of the Catalinas to peer down through a screen of bright noise. Another hour and V-Million will be completely invisible. Then, if Bischoff has kept careful records of their speed and course, dead reckoning will tell them approximately where they are, and enable them to run down the Palawan Passage in the night, or to cut west across the South China Sea if that seems like a good idea. But really he is hoping to find some nice pirate cove on the north coast of Borneo, marry a nice orangutan, and raise a little family.

The face of the depth dial says Tiefenmesser in that old-fashioned Gothic lettering that the Nazis loved so much. Messer means a gauge or meter, but it also means knife. Das Messer sitzt mir an der Kehle. The knife is at my throat; I am face-to-face with doom. When the knife is at your throat, you don't want it to move the way the needle on the Tiefenmesser is moving now. Every tick on the dial's face is another meter of water between Bischoff and the sun and the air.

"I would like to be a Messerschmidt," Bischoff mutters. A man who smashes Messers with a hammer, but also a beautiful thing that flies.

"You will see light, and breathe fresh air again, Günter," says Rudolf von Hacklheber, a civilian mathematician who really has no place on the bridge of a U-boat during a fight to the death. But there's no goodplace for him to be, and so here he is.

Now this is a fine thing for Rudy to say, a lovely show of support for Günter. But saving the life of everyone on the U-boat, and getting its cargo of gold to safety, now depends on Günter's emotional stability, and especially on his confidence. Sometimes, if you want to live and breathe tomorrow, you have to dive into the black depths today, and that is a leap of faith--faith in your U-boat, and your crew--beside which the saints' religious epiphanies amount to nothing.

So Rudy's promise is soon forgotten--or at least it is forgotten by Bischoff. Bischoff derives strengthfrom having heard it, and from similar things that members of his crew say to him, and from their grins and thumbs-up and slaps on the shoulder, and their displays of pluck and initiative, the clever repairs that they make to broken plumbing and overtaxed engines. Strength gives him faith, and faith makes him into a good U-boat skipper. Some would say the best who ever lived. But Bischoff knows many others, better than him, whose bodies are trapped in knuckles of imploded metal on the floor of the North Atlantic.

It comes together like this: the sun has gone down, as it can be relied on to do every day, even when you are a beleaguered U-boat. The V-Millionhas reamed a tunnel through the Palawan Passage, screaming along, for several hours, at the completely unreasonable speed of twenty-nine knots--four times as fast as U-boats are supposed to be capable of going.

The Americans will have drawn a small circle around the point in the ocean where the mysterious U-boat was last sighted. But the speed of the V-Millionis four times as great as they think it is. The real circle is four times as wide as the one they've drawn. The Yanks won't expect them to surface where they are.