Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

Goto Dengo stands there silently for a while, until he notices that the other men are all looking at him expectantly. Then he checks his watch. He is shocked to see that only half an hour has gone by since he set off the dynamite.

“We have an hour and a half before the water traps are flooded. If we are not in the Bubble by then, we will be sealed off, with no escape possible,” says Goto Dengo.

“We go there and wait,” Wing suggests, in Shanghainese.

“No. Captain Noda listens, outside, for more explosions,” Goto Dengo says, also in Chinese; then, in English, tells the Filipinos, “We have to set off the demolition charges at certain times or Noda-san will grow suspicious.”

“Whoever sets them off will be trapped forever in this chamber,” Rodolfo says, gesturing around them at the Hall of Glory.

“We will not set them off from here,” says Goto Dengo, pulling the lid from a crate. Inside are several long coils of two-stranded telephone wire. He hands the coils out to Rodolfo, Wing, and Bong. They understand, and begin to splice the new wires onto the ones that terminate here.

They retreat through Golgotha in stages, lugging battery packs with them and unrolling the wires as they go, dynamiting the tunnel sections behind them one by one. As they do this, certain oddities of the tunnel system finally become clear to Rodolfo, Wing, and Bong. It becomes fully evident to them, for the first time, that the entire complex was carefully designed by Goto Dengo to serve two entirely contradictory purposes. To a loyal Nipponese engineer like Captain Noda it looks like precisely what he was ordered to build: a vault laced with booby traps. But to the four men sealed inside, Golgotha has a second function. It is an escape machine. As the purposes of certain rooms, drifts, and other features suddenly become clear, they straighten up, blinking, and turn to look at Goto Dengo, with the same expressions as the soldiers wore, weeks ago, when they discovered the Buddha in the Mercedes.

Their destination is the Bubble, a niche that Goto Dengo had them carve out of the stone during the last couple of months. He claimed, to anyone who asked, that it was a water reservoir, put there to increase the deadliness of one of the traps. It is a wide vertical shaft, four meters in diameter, that begins in the ceiling of a peripheral drift and goes straight up for a few meters, then dead-ends. Ladders still cling to its walls, and by ascending, they can reach a rock ledge big enough to sit on. Canteens of water and boxes of biscuits have already been stocked here by Wing and his men.

By the time they reach their seats in the top of the Bubble, all of the others are in awe of Goto Dengo, and ready to do whatever he says. He senses this. It fills him with unutterable misery.

They have fifteen minutes to wait. The others spend it sipping water and nibbling biscuits. Goto Dengo fills it with self-recrimination. “I am a loathsome worm,” he says, “a traitor, a filthy piece of dog shit, not worthy to clean out the latrines of true soldiers of Nippon. I am bereft—totally cut off from the nation I've betrayed. I am now part of a world of people who hate Nippon—and who therefore hate me—but at the same time I am hateful to my own kind. I will stay here and die.”

“You are alive,” Rodolfo says. “You have saved our lives. And you are rich.”

“Rich?”

Wing and Rodolfo and Bong look at each other, confused. “Yes, of course!” Bong says.

Goto Dengo is still looking nonplussed. Reckoning that he has merely gone deaf or daft from the explosions, Bong reaches into his trousers and pulls out a hand-sewn pouch, teases it open, and displays a healthy double handful of diamonds. Wing and Rodolfo scarcely take note.

Goto Dengo looks away despondently. He himself has saved no treasure except these men's lives. But that's not why he feels so bad. He had hoped that being thus saved they would all be noble, and not think of the treasure. But maybe that was too much to hope for.

A distant thump lifts them slightly off the ledge, just for a moment. Goto Dengo feels a strange sensation in his head: the air pressure is beginning to rise. The column of air trapped in the diagonal is being compressed by a piston of water rushing down it from the lake. Captain Noda has dynamited the plug.

Goto Dengo is so excited that he forgets to die.

He is an engineer, trapped inside one of his own machines. The machine was designed to keep him alive, and he will never know whether it worked unless it works. After he has achieved that satisfaction, he supposes, he can always kill himself at leisure.

He pinches his nose shut, presses his lips together, and begins to blow air into his Eustachian tubes, equalizing the pressure. The others follow his lead.

All of Golgotha's traps are basically the same. All of them derive their killing power from the pressure of the water communicated down to this level from the bottom of Lake Yamamoto. In any number of places in the complex, false walls have been constructed, designed to be pierced by greedy thieves, or to collapse of their own accord when thieves dig out the sand that holds them up. Then the water will rush in with explosive force and probably crush them before they have a chance to drown.

At its Golgotha end, the diagonal tunnel forks again and again, like a river breaking up into distributaries. Goto Dengo explained it to inspecting officers by likening it to the plumbing inside a modern hotel, which is supplied by a single main that is pressurized by a distant water tower, but which divides into many different pipes that supply pressurized water to taps all over the structure.

Golgotha seethes, hisses, and moans as every pipe in its ramified system is pressurized by the deluge unleashed by Captain Noda's dynamite charge. The bubbles of air trapped at the ends of those pipes are seeking escape: some are leaking out through cracks in the walls and others are bubbling away into the diagonal. The surface of Lake Yamamoto must be boiling like a cauldron, and Captain Noda must be standing above it, watching the air flee Golgotha, grinning with satisfaction. In moments, the floors of the tunnels are obscured by whirling lagoons of dirty water, and the barrels and railcars that were left there have begun to rise, bobbing like corks and clanging together.

Most of the air trapped in the Golgotha does not, however, come bubbling up out of Lake Yamamoto. Most of it rises towards the Bubble, because that is how Goto Dengo planned it. He knows it's working because his ears begin to pop.

Eventually the water rises up into the Bubble itself, but it rises slowly, because the pressure of the air in here has become quite high already. As the water climbs, it further pressurizes the bubble of air in which Goto Dengo and the others are trapped. The pressure of the air rises steadily until it becomes equal to the pressure of the water. Then balance is achieved, and the water cannot rise any more. Another kind of balance is being reached within their bodies, as the compressed air floods into their chests, and the nitrogen in that air seeps through the membranes of their lungs and dissolves into their bloodstreams.

“Now we wait,” says Goto Dengo, and shuts off his acetylene lamp, leaving them in darkness. “As long as we do not burn lamps, there is enough air in this chamber to keep us alive for several days. Captain Noda and his men will spend at least that long tidying up the Bundok site, erasing all traces of our work, and killing themselves. So we must wait, or else his men will only kill us when we appear on the shores of Lake Yamamoto. I would like to spend the time educating you on the subject of caisson disease, also known as the bends.”

Two days later they set off one last, relatively small dynamite charge, blowing a hole through the wall of the Bubble that is large enough to admit a human being. On the other side, the diagonal to Lake Yamamoto begins.