Cryptonomicon

The pumps are mighty, house-sized things; they have to be to fight the back-pressure that they are going to engender. Goto Dengo's young engineers see to it that they are mated into the two vertical holes on top: one to supply compressed air, the other pressurized fuel oil. Doug Shaftoe would like to be involved in this, but he knows it's over his head technically, and he's got other duties: securing the defensive perimeter against gold-seekers and whatever creepy-crawly individuals Wing might have sent out to harass and sabotage them. But Doug has put the Word out, and a whole lot of Doug's very interesting and well-traveled friends have converged on Golgotha from all over the world and are now camped out in foxholes in the jungle, guarding a defensive perimeter strung with monofilament tripwires and other stuff that Randy doesn't even want to know about. Doug just tells him to stay away from the perimeter, and he does. But Randy can sense Doug's interest in the central project here, and so when the big day comes, he lets Doug be the one to throw the switch.

There is a lot of praying first: Avi's brought in a rabbi from Israel, and Enoch Root has brought in the Archbishop of Manila, and Goto Dengo has flown in some Shinto priests, and various Southeast Asian countries have gotten in on the act too. All of them pray or chant for the memory of their departed, though the prayers are practically drowned out by the choppers overhead. A lot of people don't want them disturbing Golgotha at all, and Randy thinks they are basically right. But he's gone out and earth-imaged Wing's tunnel, this subterranean tentacle of air reaching towards the hoard, and released three-dimensional maps of everything to the media, and made the case--reasonably well, he thinks--that it's better to do something constructive than to let it get ripped off by the likes of Wing. Some people have come around to his side and some haven't, but none of the latter group is on the cover of Timeand Newsweek.

Doug Shaftoe is the last guy to take the floor. He removes his mesh-back cap, puts it over his heart, and with tears streaming down his face says something about his father, whom he just barely remembers. He speaks of the Battle of Manila and of how he saw his father for the first time in the wreckage of the Church of San Agustin, and how his father carried him up and down the stairway there before going off to bring hellfire down upon the Nipponese. He speaks about forgiveness and certain other abstractions, and the words are all chopped up and blurred by the helicopters overhead, which only makes it more powerful as far as Randy's concerned, since it's basically all about a bunch of memories that are all chopped up and blurred in Doug's memory to begin with. Finally Doug works his way around to some kind of resolution that is very clear in his heart and mind but poorly articulated, and hits the switch.

The pumps take a few minutes to pressurize Golgotha with a highly combustible mixture of air and fuel oil, and then Doug hits another switch that sets off a small detonation down below. Then the world shudders and rumbles before settling down into a kind of suppressed throbbing howl. A jet of white-hot flame shoots out of the drain hole down below, digs itself into the river very close to where Andrew Loeb came to rest, and throws up a cloud of steam that forces all of the choppers to gain altitude. Randy crawls down under the cover of that steam-cloud, sensing it's the last privacy he'll ever have, and sits down by the edge of the river to watch. After half an hour the jet of hot gas is joined by a rivulet of incandescent fluid that sinks to the bottom of the stream as soon as it emerges, clothed in a fuzz of wildly boiling water. For a long time there is really nothing to be seen except steam; but after Golgotha's been burning for an hour or two, it becomes possible to see that underneath the shallow water, spreading down the valley floor, indeed right around the isolated boulder where Randy's perched, is a bright, thick river of gold.

APPENDIX: THE SOLITAIRE ENCRYPTION ALGORITHM

by Bruce Schneier

Author, Applied Cryptography

President, Counterpane Systems

http://www.counterpane.com