Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

“And it might make you a lot of money along the way,” Amy reminds him.

Randy laughs. “At this point, it's not even about trying to make money,” he says. “I just don't want to be totally humiliated.”

Amy smiles cryptically.

“What?” Randy demands.

“You sounded just like a Shaftoe when you said that,” Amy says.

Randy drives the car in silence for about half an hour after that. He was right, he suspects: it was a pivotal moment in the relationship. All he can do now is totally screw it up. So he shuts up and drives.

For two months he sleeps on a beach on New Caledonia, stretched out under a mosquito net, dreaming of worse places, polishing his line.

In Stockholm, someone from the British Embassy got him to a certain cafe. A gentleman he met in the cafe got him to a car. The car got him to a lake where a floatplane just happened to be sitting with its motors running and its lights off. The Special Air Service got him to London. Naval Intelligence got him back to D.C., drained his brain, and turned him over to the Marines with a big stamp on his papers saying that he must never again be sent into combat; he Knew Too Much to be taken prisoner. The Marines found that he Knew Too Little to serve as a Rear Echelon Motherfucker, and gave him a choice: a one-way ticket home, or higher education. He opted for the ticket home, then talked a green officer into believing that his family had moved, and home was now San Francisco.

You could practically cross San Francisco Bay by jumping from one Navy ship to the next. The waterfront was lined with the Navy's piers, depots, hospitals, and prisons. All of them were guarded by Shaftoe's military brothers. Shaftoe's tattoos were obscured by civilian clothes and his haircut grown out. But he only had to look a Marine in the eye from a stone's throw, and that Marine would recognize him for a brother in need and open any gate for him, break any regulation, probably even lay down his life. Shaftoe stowed away on a ship bound for Hawaii so fast he didn't even have time to get drunk. From Pearl, it took him four days to get on a ship to Kwajalein. There, he was a legendary hero. His money was no good on Kwaj; he smoked, drank and ate for a week without being allowed to spend a dime, and finally his brothers got him on a plane that took him a couple of thousand miles due south to Noumea, in New Caledonia.

They did so with great reluctance. They would willingly have hit a beach with him, but this was different: they were sending him perilously close to SOWESPAC, the Southwest Pacific Theater, the domain of The General. Even now, a couple of years after The General had sent them into action, poorly armed and poorly supported, on Guadalcanal, Marines still spent approximately fifty percent of their waking hours talking about what a bad guy he was. He secretly owned half of Intramuros. He had become a billionaire from Spanish gold that his father had dug up when he'd been governor of the Philippines. Quezon had secretly named him postwar dictator of the archipelago. The General was running for president, and in order to win, he was going to start throwing battles just to make F.D.R. look bad, and blaming it all on the Marines. And if that didn't work he'd come back to the States and stage a coup d'etat. Which would be beaten back, against enormous odds, by the United States Marine Corps. Semper Fi!

Anyway, his brothers got him to New Caledonia. Noumea's a neat French city of wide streets and tin-roofed buildings, fronting on a big harbor lined with mountainous dumps of nickel and chromium ore from gigantic mines up-island. The place is about one-third Free French (there's pictures of de Gaulle all over the place), one-third American servicemen, and one-third cannibals. Word on the street is that the cannibals have not eaten any white people in twenty-seven years, so Bobby Shaftoe, sleeping out on that beach, feels almost as safe as he did in Sweden.

But when he reached Noumea he slammed into a barrier more impervious than any brick wall: the imaginary line between the Pacific theater (Nimitz's turf) and SOWESPAC. Brisbane, The General's headquarters, is just a short (by Pacific standards) hop almost due west. If he can just get there and deliver his line, everything's going to be fine.

During his first couple of weeks on the beach, he's stupidly optimistic. Then he's depressed for about a month, thinking he'll never get off this place. Finally he starts to come around, starts to display adaptability again. He's had no luck getting on board a ship. But the amount of air traffic is incredible. Seems that The General likes airplanes. Shaftoe starts tailing flyboys. The MPs won't give him the time of day, he can't get into an Army NCOs' Club to save his life.

But an NCOs' Club offers strictly limited entertainments. Customers in search of more profound satisfactions must leave the perimeter defined by hardassed MPs and enter the civilian economy. And when horny, well-paid American flyboys are dropped into a culture defined half by cannibals and half by Frenchmen, you get a hell of a civilian economy. Shaftoe finds a vantage point outside an airbase gate, plants himself there, his pockets loaded with cigarette packs (the Marines on Kwaj left him with a lifetime supply) and waits. Flyboys come out in twos and threes. Shaftoe picks out the sergeants, follows them to bars and whorehouses, sits down in their line of sight, begins to chain-smoke. Before long they've come over and started to bum cigarettes off him. This leads to conversations.

Once he gets this routine figured out, he learns a lot about the Fifth Air Force in a big hurry, makes a lot of friends. In a few weeks, he strikes the jackpot. He goes over the airfield fence at 1:00 A.M. of a moonless night, belly-crawls for about a mile along the shoulder of a runway, and just barely makes a rendezvous with the crew of the Tipsy Tootsie, a B-24 Liberator bound for Brisbane. In fairly short order, he finds himself stuffed into the glass sphere at the tail of the plane: the rear ball turret. Its purpose, of course, is to shoot down Zeroes, which tend to attack from behind. But Tipsy Tootsie's crew seems to think that they are about as likely to find Zeroes around here as they would be over central Missouri.

They warned him to wear something warm, but he didn't have anything of that nature. Tipsy Tootsie has barely left the runway when he begins to understand his mistake: the temperature drops like a five-hundred-pound bomb. It is physically impossible for him to get out of the turret. Even if he could, it would just lead to his getting arrested; he has been smuggled on board without the knowledge of the officers who are actually flying the plane. Calmly he decides to add prolonged hypothermia to his already extensive knowledge of suffering. After a couple of hours, he either loses consciousness or falls asleep, and this helps.

He is awakened by pink light that comes from every direction at once. The plane has lost altitude, the temperature has risen, his body has thawed out enough to bring him awareness. After a few minutes he's able to move his arms. He reaches into the pink glow and rubs condensation off the inside of the ball turret. He takes out a hanky, wipes the whole thing clean, and now he's looking straight down the throat of a Pacific dawn.

The sky is streaked and mottled by black clouds, like jets of squid ink in a Caribbean cove. For a while, it's as if he is under water with Bischoff.

Puckered scars mar the Pacific in loops and lines, and he is reminded of his own naked flesh. But the hard jagged pieces work their way out of the scar tissue like old shrapnel: coral reefs emerging from a shallowing sea. Warmer and warmer. He begins to shiver again.

Someone has dumped brown dust into the Pacific, made a great pile of it. On the edge of the pile, is a city. The city swings around them, comes closer. Warmer and warmer. It's Brisbane. A runway streaks up and he thinks it's going to take his ass off, like the world's biggest belt sander. The plane stops. He smells gasoline.