Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

Meanwhile, down below, Lieutenant Mori and a small work detail have planted some fenceposts and strung some barbed wire—just enough to contain a hundred or so prisoners, who arrive packed into a couple of military trucks. When these are put to work, the camp expands very rapidly; the military barracks go up in a few days and the double barbed-wire perimeter is completed. They never seem to lack for supplies here. Dynamite comes in by the truckload, as if it weren't desperately needed in places like Rabaul, and is carefully stored under the supervision of Goto Dengo. Prisoners carry it into a special shed that has been constructed for this purpose in the shade of the jungle. Goto Dengo has not been close to the prisoners before, and is startled to realize that they are all Chinese. And they are not speaking the dialect of Canton or of Formosa, but rather one that Goto Dengo heard frequently when he was posted in Shanghai. These prisoners are northern Chinese.

It is stranger and stranger all the time, this Bundok place.

The Filipinos, he knows, have been uniquely surly about their inclusion in the Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere. They are well-armed, and MacArthur has been egging them on. Many thousands of them have been taken prisoner. Within half a day's drive of Bundok there are more than enough Filipino prisoners to fill Lieutenant Mori's camp and accomplish Lieutenant Goto's project. And yet the powers that be have shipped hundreds of Chinese people all the way down from Shanghai to do this work.

At times like this he begins to doubt his own sanity. He feels an urge to discuss the matter with Lieutenant Ninomiya. But the surveyor, his friend and confidant, has made himself scarce since his work was completed. One day, Goto Dengo goes by Ninomiya's tent and finds it empty. Captain Noda explains that the surveyor was called away suddenly to perform important work elsewhere.

About a month later, when the road-building work in the Special Security Zone is well underway, some of the Chinese workers who are digging begin shouting excitedly. Goto Dengo understands what they are saying.

They have uncovered human remains. The jungle has done its work and practically nothing is left but bones, but the smell, and the legions of ants, tell him that the corpse is a fairly recent one. He grabs a shovel from one of the workers and pulls up a scoop of dirt and carries it over to the river, dripping tangles of ants. He lowers it carefully into the running water. The dirt dissolves into a brown trail in the river and the skull is soon revealed: the dome of the head, the eye sockets still not entirely empty, the nasal bone with some fragments of cartilage still attached, and finally the jaws, pocked with old abcesses and missing most of their teeth, except for one gold tooth in the middle. The current turns the skull over slowly, as if Lieutenant Ninomiya is hiding his face in shame, and Goto Dengo sees a neat hole punched through the base of the skull.

He looks up. A dozen Chinese are gathered above him on the riverbank, watching him impassively.

“Do not speak of this to any of the other Nipponese,” Goto Dengo says. Their eyes go wide and their lips part in astonishment as they hear him speaking the precise dialect of Shanghai prostitutes.

One of the Chinese workers is nearly bald. He seems to be in his forties, though prisoners age rapidly and so it is always difficult to tell. He is not scared like the others. He is looking at Goto Dengo appraisingly.

“You,” Goto Dengo says, “pick two other men and follow me. Bring shovels.”

He leads them into the jungle, into a place where he knows there will be no further digging, and shows them where to put Lieutenant Ninomiya's new grave. The bald man is a good leader as well as a strong worker and he gets the grave dug quickly, then transfers the remains without squeamishness or complaint. If he has been through the China Incident and survived for this long as a prisoner of war, he has probably seen and done much worse.

Goto Dengo does his part by distracting Captain Noda for a couple of hours. They go up and tour the dam work on the Yamamoto River. Noda is anxious to create Lake Yamamoto as soon as possible, before MacArthur's air force makes detailed surveys of the area. The sudden appearance of a lake in the jungle would probably not go unnoticed.

The site of the lake is a natural rock bowl, covered by jungle, with the Yamamoto River running through the middle of it. Right next to the riverbank, men are already at work with rock drills, placing dynamite charges. “The inclined shaft will start here,” Goto Dengo tells Captain Noda, “and runs straight—” turning his back on the river he makes one hand into a blade and thrusts it into the jungle “—straight down to Golgotha.” The Place of the Skull.

“Gargotta?” Captain Noda says.

“It is a Tagalog word,” Goto Dengo says authoritatively. “It means 'hidden glade.' ”

“Hidden glade. I like it! Very good. Gargotta!” Captain Noda says. “Your work is proceeding very well, Lieutenant Goto.”

“I am only striving to live up to the high standard that was set by Lieutenant Ninomiya,” says Goto Dengo.

“He was an excellent worker,” Noda says evenly.

“Perhaps when I am finished here, I can follow him to—wherever he was sent.”

Noda grins. “Your work is only beginning. But I can say with confidence that when you are finished you will be reunited with your friend.”

Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse's widow and five children agree that Dad did something in the war, and that's about all. Each of them seems to have a different 1950s B-movie, or 1940s Movietone newsreel, in his or her head, portraying a rather different set of events. There is not even agreement on whether he was in the Army or the Navy, which seems like a pretty fundamental plot point to Randy. Was he in Europe or Asia? Opinions differ. Grandma grew up on an Outback sheep farm. One might therefore think that, at some point in her life, she might have been an earthy cuss—the type of woman who would not only remember which service her late husband had been in but would be able to take down his rifle from the attic and field-strip it blindfolded. But she had evidently spent something like seventy-five percent of her waking hours in church (where she not only worshipped but went to school and transacted essentially all of her social life), or in transit thereto or therefrom, and her own parents quite explicitly did not want her to wind up living on a farm, ramming her arm up livestock vaginas and slapping raw steaks over the black eyes dished out by some husband. Farming might have been an adequate sort of booby prize for one or at most two of their sons, sort of a fallback for any offspring who happened to suffer major head injuries or fall into chronic alcoholism. But the real purpose of the cCmndhd kids was to restore the past and lost glories of the family, who allegedly had been major wool brokers around the time of Shakespeare and well on their way to living in Kensington and spelling their name Smith before some combination of scrapie, long-term climatic change, nefarious conduct by jealous Outer Qwghlmians, and a worldwide shift in fashions away from funny-smelling thirty-pound sweaters with small arthropods living in them had driven them all into honest poverty and then not-so-honest poverty and led to their forcible transportation to Australia.

The point here being that Grandma was incarnated, indoctrinated, and groomed by her Ma to wear stockings and lipstick and gloves in a big city somewhere. The experiment had succeeded to the point where Mary cCmndhd could, at any point in her post-adolescent life, have prepared and served high tea to the Queen of England on ten minutes' notice, flawlessly, without having to even glance in a mirror, straighten up her dwelling, polish any silver, or bone up on any etiquette. It had been a standing joke among her male offspring that Mom could walk unescorted into any biker bar in the world and simply by her bearing and appearance cause all ongoing fistfights to be instantly suspended, all grubby elbows to be removed from the bar, postures to straighten, salty language to be choked off. The bikers would climb over one another's backs to take her coat, pull her chair back, address her as ma'am, etc. Though it had never been performed, this biker bar scene was like a whole sort of virtual or notional comedy sketch that was a famous moment in entertainment for the Waterhouse family, like the Beatles on Ed Sullivan or Belushi doing his samurai bit on Saturday Night Live. It was up there on their mental videocassette shelves right next to their imaginary newsreels and B-movies of what the Patriarch had done in the war.