Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

There is one thing left to do. Actually it's a pretty big thing. The Epiphyte people use Tombstone for all kinds of purposes, and there's no way of telling whether other copies of that latitude and longitude exist on it somewhere. Most of Epiphyte is made up of inveterate computer users who would be just the sort to write little scripts to back up all of their old e-mail messages to an archive every week. So he whips up his own script that will just write random information to every sector on the entire hard drive, then go back and do it again, and again, and again, forever—or until the cops pull the plug. Just after he whacks the Enter key to send this command in to Tombstone, he hears an electrical buzzing noise from the van that makes his hair stand on end for a moment. He sees a cop in the video window, frozen. Then the screen of his computer goes blank.

Randy looks over toward the old van. The Dwarves are high-fiving each other.

There is a screeching of tires, and the sound of a low-speed collision, out on the street. About a dozen cars have rolled quietly to a stop, and some have been rear-ended by others that are still functioning. The McDonald's has gone dark. Television technicians are cursing inside their mobile units. Police officers and lawyers are pounding their walkie-talkies and cellphones against their hands.

“Pardon me,” Randy says to the Dwarves, “but would you gentlemen like to share anything with me?”

“We just took out the whole building,” says one of the Dwarves.

“Took it out, in what sense?”

“Nailed it with a big electromagnetic pulse. Fried every chip within range.”

“So it's a scorched-earth kind of deal? Go ahead and confiscate that gear, you damn Feds, it's all worthless junk now?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it certainly worked on those cars,” Randy says, “and it definitely worked on this piece of junk that used to be my computer.”

“Don't worry—it has no effect on hard drives,” the Dwarf says, “so all of your files are intact.”

“I know you are expecting me to take that as good news,” Randy says.

A car is coming. The engine noise is expensively muffled, but it sounds like a diesel. Goto Dengo is awake, waiting for it, and so is the rest of the camp. No one stirs at Bundok during the day anymore, except for the radio men and those manning the anti aircraft guns. They have not been told that MacArthur is on Luzon, but they all sense The General's presence. The American planes rip across the sky all day long, glittering and proud, like starships from a distant future that none of them will ever see, and the earth rings like a bell from the impacts of distant naval guns. The shipments have become smaller but more frequent: one or two broken-down lorries every night, their rear bumpers practically scraping the road under crippling burdens of gold.

Lieutenant Mori has placed anther machine gun at the front gate, concealed in the foliage, just in case some Americans happen to blunder up this road in a jeep. Somewhere out there in the dark, the barrel of that weapon is tracking this car as it jounces up the road. The men know every dip and rise in that road, and can tell where the vehicles are by listening for the scrape of their undercarriages against the hardpan, a signature pattern of metallic dots and dashes.

The car's headlamps are off, of course, and the guards at the gate dare not shine bright lights around. One of them risks opening up a kerosene lantern, and aims its beam at the visitor. A silver Mercedes-Benz hood ornament springs forth from the blackness, supported by a chrome-plated radiator grille. The beam of the lantern fondles the car's black fenders, its sweeping silver exhaust pipes, its running boards, clotted with the meat of young coconuts—it must have sideswiped a pile on its way up here. In the driver's side window is the face of a Nipponese man in his forties, so haggard and tired he looks as though he is about to burst into tears. But he is just a driver. Next to him is a sergeant with a sawed-off shotgun, Nipponese rifles being generally too long to wield in the front seat of a luxury car. Behind them, a drawn curtain conceals whatever, or whoever, is in the backseat.

“Open!” demands the guard, and the driver reaches up behind his head and parts the curtain. The lantern beam falls through the opening and bounces back sharply from a pale face in the back seat. Several of the soldiers shout. Goto Dengo steps back, rattled, then moves in for a better look.

The man in the backseat has a very large head. But the strange thing about him is that his skin is a rich yellow color—not the normal Asian yellow—and it glitters. He is wearing a peculiar, pointed hat, and he has a calm smile on his face—an expression the likes of which Goto Dengo has not seen since the war began.

More lantern beams come on, the ring of soldiers and officers closes in on the Mercedes. Someone pulls the rear door open and then jumps back as if he has burned his hand on it.

The passenger is sitting crosslegged on the backseat, which has been crushed into a broad V beneath his weight.

It is a solid gold Buddha, looted from somewhere else in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, coming to meditate in serene darkness atop the hoard of Golgotha.

It turns out to be small enough to fit through the entrance, but too big to go in one of the little railway cars, and so the strongest Filipino men must spend the next hours shoving it down the tunnel one inch at a time.

The early shipments were neatly crated, and the crates were stenciled with labels identifying the contents as machine gun ammunition or mortar rounds or the like. The crates that come later don't have the stencils. At a certain point, the gold begins to arrive in cardboard boxes and rotten steamer trunks. They fall open all the time, and the workers patiently gather the gold up and carry it to the tunnel entrance in their arms and throw it into the hand cars. The bars tumble end over end and smash into the sheet-metal with a din that scares clouds of birds out of the overhanging trees. Goto Dengo cannot help looking at the bars. They come in different sizes, some of them so large that it takes two men to carry one. They are stamped with the names of central banks from a few places Goto Dengo has been and many he's only heard of: Singapore, Saigon, Batavia, Manila, Rangoon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Canton. There is French gold that was apparently shipped to Cambodia, and Dutch gold shipped to Jakarta, and British gold shipped to Singapore—all to keep it out of the hands of the Germans.

But some shipments consist entirely of gold from the Bank of Tokyo. They get five convoys in a row of the stuff. According to the tally that Goto Dengo is keeping in his head, two-thirds of the tonnage stored in Golgotha ends up coming straight from Nippon's central reserves. All of it is cold to the touch, and stored in good but old crates. He concludes that it was shipped to the Philippines a long time ago and has been sitting in a cellar in Manila ever since, waiting for this moment. They must have shipped it here at about the same time that Goto Dengo was plucked off the beach in New Guinea, way back in late 1943.

They have known. They have known for that long that they were going to lose the war.

By the middle of January, Goto Dengo has begun to look back on the Christmas Day massacre with something almost like nostalgia, missing the atmosphere of naive innocence that made the killings necessary. Until that morning, even he had managed to convince himself that Golgotha was an arms cache that the emperor's soldiers would someday use to stage a glorious reconquest of Luzon. He knows that the workers believed it too. Now everyone knows about the gold, and the camp has changed. Everyone understands that there will be no exit.