Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

The pilot discovers him, loses his temper, and makes ready to call the MPs. “I'm here to work for The General,” Shaftoe mumbles through blue lips. It just makes the pilot want to slug him. But after Shaftoe has uttered these words, everything is different, the angry officers stand a pace or two farther away from him, tone down their language, knock off the threats. Shaftoe knows, from this, that The General does things differently.

He spends a day recovering in a flophouse, then rises, shaves, drinks a cup of coffee, and strikes out in search of brass.

To his extreme chagrin, he learns that The General has relocated his headquarters to Hollandia, in New Guinea. But his wife and son, and a bunch of his staff, are still staying at Lennon's Hotel. Shaftoe goes there and analyzes the traffic pattern: to pull into the hotel's horseshoe drive, the cars have to come around a particular corner, just up the street. Shaftoe finds a good loitering-place near that corner, and waits. Looking through the windows of the approaching cars, he can see the epaulets, count the stars and eagles.

Seeing two stars, he decides to make his move. Jogging down the block, he reaches the awning of the hotel just as this general's door is being hauled open by his driver.

“'Scuse me, General, Bobby Shaftoe reporting for duty, sir!” he blurts, snapping out the perfectest salute in military history.

“And who the hell might you be, Bobby Shaftoe?” says this general, hardly batting an eye. He talks like Bischoff! This guy actually has a German accent!

“I've killed more Nips than seismic activity. I'm trained to jump out of airplanes. I speak a little Nip. I can survive in the jungle. I know Manila like the back of my hand. My wife and child are there. And I'm kinda at loose ends. Sir!”

In London, in D.C., he'd never have gotten this close, and if he had he'd have been shot or arrested.

But this is SOWESPAC, and so the next morning at dawn he's on a B-17 bound for Hollandia, wearing Army green, no rank.

New Guinea is a nasty-looking piece of work: a gangrenous dragon with a wicked, rocky spine, covered with ice. Just looking at it makes Shaftoe shiver from a queasy combination of hypothermia and incipient malaria. The whole thing belongs to The General now. Shaftoe can plainly see that such a country could only be conquered by a man who was completely fucking out of his mind. A month in Stalingrad would be preferable to twenty-four hours down there.

Hollandia is on the north shore of this beast, facing, naturally, towards the Philippines. It is well known throughout Marinedom that The General has caused a palace to be built for himself there. Some credulous fools actually believe the rumor that it is merely a complete 200%-scale replica of the Taj Mahal, built by enslaved Marines, but savvy jarheads know that it is actually a much vaster compound built out of construction materials stolen from Navy hospital ships, dotted with pleasure domes and fuck houses for his string of Asiatic concubines, with a soaring cupola so high that The General can go up there and see what the Nips are doing to his extensive real estate holdings in Manila, 1,500 miles to the northwest.

Bobby Shaftoe sees no such thing out the windows of the B-17. He glimpses one large and nice-looking house up on a mountain above the sea. He supposes that it is a mere sentry post, marking the benighted perimeter of The General's domain. But almost immediately the B-17 bounces down on a runway. The cabin is invaded by an equatorial miasma. It's like breathing Cream O' Wheat direct from a blurping vat. Shaftoe feels his bowels loosening up already. Of course there are many Marines who feel that Army uniform trousers look best when feces-stained. Shaftoe must put such thoughts out of his head.

All the passengers (mostly colonels and better) move as to avoid working up a sweat, even though they are already drenched. Shaftoe wants to kick their fat, waffled butts downstairs—he's in a hurry to get to Manila.

Pretty soon he is hitching a ride on the rear bumper of a jeep full of brass. The airfield is still ringed with ack-ack guns, and shows signs of having been bombed and strafed not too long ago. Some of these signs are obvious physical evidence like shell holes, but Shaftoe gets most of his information from watching the men: their posture, their facial expressions as they stare into the sky, tell him exactly what the threat level is.

No wonder, he thinks, remembering the sight of that big white house up on the mountain. You can probably see that thing by moonlight, for crissakes! It must be visible from Tokyo! It's just begging to be strafed.

Then, as the jeep begins to trundle up the mountain in first gear, he figures it out: that thing's just a decoy. The General's real command post must be a network of deep tunnels hidden beneath the jungle floor, and that is where you would have to look for your Asiatic concubines, etc.

The trip up the mountain takes an eon. Shaftoe jumps off and soon outpaces the whining jeep, and the one in front of it. Then he's on his own, walking through the jungle. He'll just follow the tracks until they lead him straight to the cleverly camouflaged mineshaft that leads down to The General's HQ.

The walk gives him plenty of time to have a couple of smokes and savor the unrelieved nightmarishness of the New Guinea jungle, compared to which Guadalcanal, which he thought was the worst place on earth, seems like a dewy meadow strewn with bunnies and butterflies. Nothing is more satisfying than to consider that the Nips and the United States Army spent a couple of years beating the crap out of each other here. Pity the Aussies had to get mixed up in it, though.

The tracks take him straight to that big white clay pigeon of a house up on the mountainside. They've gone way overboard in trying to make the house look like someone's actually living there. Shaftoe can see furniture and everything. The walls are crisscrossed by bullet trails. They have even set up a mannequin on the balcony, in a pink silk dressing gown, corncob pipe, and aviator sunglasses, scanning the bay through binoculars! As reluctant as he is to approve of anything done by the Army, Shaftoe cannot keep himself from laughing out loud at this witticism. Military humor at its finest. He can't believe they got away with it. A couple of press photographers are standing down below, taking pictures of the scene.

Standing in the middle of the house's mud parking lot, he plants his feet wide and thrusts his middle finger up at that mannequin. Hey, asshole, this one's from the Marines on Kwajalein! Damn, this feels good.

The mannequin swivels and aims its binoculars directly at Bobby Shaftoe, who freezes solid in his bird-flipping posture as if caught in the gaze of a basilisk. Down below, air-raid sirens begin to weep and wail.

The binoculars come away from the sunglasses. A puff of smoke blurts out of the pipe. The General snaps out a sarcastic salute. Shaftoe remembers to put his finger away, then stands there, rooted like a dead mahogany.

The General reaches up and removes the pipe from his mouth so he can say, “Magandang gabi.”

“You mean, 'magandang umaga,' ” Shaftoe says. “Gabi means night and umaga means morning.”

The drone of airplane engines is now getting quite noticeable. The press photographers decide to pack it in, and disappear into the house.

“When you're headed north from Manila towards Lingayen and you get to the fork in the road at Tarlac and you take the right fork, there, and head across the cane breaks towards Urdaneta, what's the first village you come to?”

“It's a trick question,” Shaftoe says. “North of Tarlac there are no cane breaks, just rice paddies.”

“Hmm. Very good,” The General says grumpily. Down below, the antiaircraft guns open up with a fantastic clattering; from this distance it sounds as if the north coast of New Guinea is being jackhammered into the sea. The General ignores it. If he were only pretending to ignore it, he would at least look at the incoming the Zeroes, so that he could stop pretending to ignore them when it got too dangerous. But he doesn't even do so much as look. Shaftoe forces himself not to look either. The General asks him a big long question in Spanish. He has a beautiful voice. He sounds like he is standing in an anechoic sound booth in New York City or Hollywood, narrating a newsreel about how great he is.