Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

They say that she has put her nursing skills to work, acting as a sort of Florence Nightingale for the Huks.

They say that she is a messenger for the Fil-American forces, that no one surpasses her daring in crossing through Nipponese checkpoints carrying secret messages and other contraband.

The last part doesn't make much sense to Shaftoe. Which is she, a nurse or a messenger? Maybe they have her confused with someone else. Or maybe she's both—maybe she's smuggling medicine through the checkpoints.

The farther south he gets, the more information he hears. The same rumors and anecdotes pop up over and over again, differing only in their small details. He runs into half a dozen people who are dead certain that Glory is south of here, working as a messenger for a brigade of Huk guerillas in the mountains above Calamba.

He spends Christmas Day in a fisherman's hut on the shores of the big lake, Laguna de Bay. There are plenty of mosquitoes. Another bout of malaria strikes him then; he spends a couple of weeks wracked with fever dreams, having bizarre nightmares about Glory.

Finally he gets well enough to move again, and hitches a boat ride into the lakeside town of Calamba. The black volcanoes that loom above it are a welcome sight. They look nice and cool, and they remind him of the ancestral Shaftoe territory. According to their family lore, the first Shaftoes to come to America worked as indentured servants in tobacco and cotton fields, raising their eyes longingly towards those cool mountains as they stooped in sweltering fields. As soon as they could get away, they did, and headed uphill. The mountains of Luzon beckon Shaftoe in the same way—away from the malarial lowlands, up towards Glory. His journey's almost over.

But he gets stuck in Calamba, forced to hide in a boathouse, when the city's Nipponese Air Force troops begin gathering their forces for some kind of a move. Those Huks up on the mountain have been giving them a hard time, and the Nips are getting crazed and vicious.

The leader of the local Huks finally sends an emissary to get Shaftoe's story. The emissary goes away and several days pass. Finally a Fil-American lieutenant returns bearing two pieces of good news: the Americans have landed in force at Lingayen Gulf, and Glory is alive and working with the Huks only a few miles away.

“Help me get out of this town,” Shaftoe pleads. “Take me out in a boat on the lake, drop me off in the countryside, then I can move.”

“Move where?” says the lieutenant, playing stupid.

“To the high ground! To join those Huks!”

“You would be killed. The ground is booby-trapped. The Huks are extremely vigilant.”

“But—”

“Why don't you go the other way?” the lieutenant asks. “Go to Manila.”

“Why would I want to go there?”

“Your son is there. And that is where you are needed. Soon the big battle will be in Manila.”

“Okay,” Shaftoe says, “I'll go to Manila. But first I want to see Glory.”

“Ah,” the lieutenant says, as if light has finally dawned. “You say you want to see Glory.”

“I'm not just saying it. I do want to see Glory.”

The lieutenant exhales a cloud of cigarette smoke and shakes his head. “No you don't,” he says flatly.

“What?”

“You don't want to see Glory.”

“How can you say that? Are you fucking out of your mind?”

The lieutenant's face goes stony. “Very well,” he says, “I will make inquiries. Perhaps Glory will come here and visit you.”

“That's crazy. It's much too dangerous.”

The lieutenant laughs. “No, you don't understand,” he says. “You are a white man in a provincial city in the Philippines occupied by starving, berserk Nips. It is impossible for you to show your face outside. Impossible. Glory, on the other hand, is free to move.”

“You said they're inspecting people almost every block.”

“They will not bother Glory.”

“Do the Nips ever—you know. Molest women?”

“Ah. You are worried about Glory being raped.” The lieutenant takes another long draw on his cigarette. “I can assure you that this will not happen.” He rises to his feet, tired of the conversation. “Wait here,” he says. “Gather your strength for the Battle of Manila.”

He walks out, leaving Shaftoe more frustrated than ever.

Two days later, the owner of the boathouse, who speaks very little English, shakes Shaftoe awake before sunrise. He beckons Shaftoe into a small boat and rows him out into the lake, then half a mile up the shore toward a sandbar. The dawn is just breaking over the other side of the big lake, illuminating planet-sized cumulus clouds. It's as if the biggest fuel dump in the whole world is being blown up in a sky diced into vast trapezoids by the linear contrails of American planes on dawn patrol.

Glory is strolling out on the sandbar. He can't see her face because she is wrapped in a silk scarf, but he would know the shape of her body anywhere. She walks back and forth along the shore, letting the warm water of the lake lap against her bare feet. She is really loving that sunrise—she keeps her back turned to Shaftoe so that she can enjoy it. What a flirt. Shaftoe gets as hard as an oar. He pats his back pocket, making sure he's well stocked with I SHALL RETURN condoms. It will be tricky, bedding down with Glory on a sandbar with this old codger here, but maybe he can pay the guy to go out and exercise his back for an hour.

The guy keeps looking over his shoulder to judge the distance to the sandbar. When they are about a stone's throw away, he sits up and ships the oars. They coast for a few yards and then come to a stop.

“What are you doing?” Shaftoe asks. Then he heaves a sigh. “You want money?” He rubs his thumb and fingertips together. “Huh? Like that?”

But the guy is just staring into his face, with an expression as tough and stony as anything that Shaftoe has seen on a hundred battlefields around the world. He waits for Shaftoe to shut up, then cocks his head and jerks it back in the direction of Glory.

Shaftoe looks up at Glory, just as she's turning around to face him. She reaches up with clublike hands, all wrapped up in long strips of cloth like a mummy's, and paws the scarf away from her face.

Or what used to be a face. Now it's just the front of her skull.

Bobby Shaftoe breathes in deep, and lets out a scream that can probably be heard in downtown Manila.

The boatman casts an anxious look toward the town, then stands up, blocking Shaftoe's view as he's drawing in another breath. One of the oars is in his hands. Shaftoe is just cutting loose with another scream when the oar clocks him in the side of the head.

The sun has made a long, skidding crash-landing along the Malay Peninsula a few hundred kilometers west, breaking open and spilling its thermonuclear fuel over about half of the horizon, trailing out a wall of salmon and magenta clouds that have blown a gash all the way through the shell of the atmosphere and erupted into space. The mountain containing the Crypt is just a charcoal shard against that backdrop. Randy is annoyed with the sunset for making it difficult to see the construction site. By now the scar in the cloud forest has mostly healed over, or, at least, some kind of green stuff has taken over the bare, lipstick-colored mud. A few GOTO ENGINEERING containers still glower in the color-distorting light of the mercury-vapor lamps around the entrance, but most of them have either moved inside the Crypt or gone back to Nippon. Randy can make out the headlights of one house-sized Goto truck winding down the road, probably filled with debris for another one of the sultan's land reclamation projects.