Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

Besides—Jesus Christ! That baseball diamond is just too far away. Even in peak condition he could not throw a grenade from here to there.

Perhaps one of those corpses out in the grass, between here and there, isn't really a corpse. Shaftoe crawls towards them on his belly and establishes that they are most definitely dead people.

Giving the field a wide berth, he begins working his way around behind home plate toward the right field line, where his people are. He would love to sneak up on the Nips from behind, but that grenade thrower really threw a fright into him. Where the hell is he?

The firing from the dugouts has become sporadic. They have stalemated now and are trying to conserve ammunition. Shaftoe risks rising to a crouch. He runs for about three paces before he sees the door to the women's toilet swing open and a man jump out, winding up like Bob Feller getting ready to throw a fastball right down the middle of the plate. Shaftoe fires his .45 once, but the weapons' absurdly vicious recoil jerks it right out of his lamed hand. The grenade comes flying towards him, perfectly on target. Shaftoe dives to the ground and scrambles for his .45. The grenade actually bounces off his shoulder and falls spinning into the dust, making a fizzing noise. But it doesn't explode.

Shaftoe looks up. The Nip is standing framed in the women's room door. His shoulders slump miserably. Shaftoe recognizes him; there's only one Nip who could throw a grenade like that. He lies there for a few moments, counting syllables on his fingers, then stands up, cups his hands around his mouth, and hollers:

Pineapple fastball—Guns of Manila applaud—Hit by pitch-free base!

Goto Dengo and Bobby Shaftoe lock themselves inside the women's room and share a nip from a bottle of port that the former has looted from a store somewhere. They spend a few minutes catching up with each other in a general way. Goto Dengo is already somewhat drunk, which makes his grenade-throwing performance all the more impressive. “I'm hyped to the gills on benzedrine,” Shaftoe says. “Keeps you going, but kind of screws up your aim.”

“I noticed!” Goto Dengo says. He is so skinny and haggard he looks more like some hypothetical sick uncle of Goto Dengo's.

Shaftoe pretends to take offense at this and drops into a judo stance. Goto Dengo laughs uneasily and waves him off. “No more fighting,” he says. A rifle bullet passes through the women's room wall and digs a crater into a porcelain sink.

“We gotta come up with a plan,” Shaftoe says.

“The plan: You live, I die,” Goto Dengo says.

“Fuck that,” Shaftoe says. “Hey, don't you idiots know you're surrounded?”

“We know,” Goto Dengo says wearily. “We know for a long time.”

“So give up, you fucking morons! Wave a white flag and you can all go home.”

“It is not Nipponese way.”

“So come up with another fucking way! Show some fucking adaptability!”

“Why are you here?” Goto Dengo asks, changing the subject. “What is your mission?”

Shaftoe explains that he's looking for his kid. Goto Dengo tells him where all of the women and children are: in the Church of St. Agustin, in Intramuros.

“Hey,” Shaftoe says, “if we surrender to you, you'll kill us. Right?”

“Yes.”

“If you guys surrender to us, we won't kill you. Promise. Scout's honor.”

“For us, living or dying is not the important thing,” Goto Dengo says.

“Hey! Tell me something I didn't fucking already know!” Shaftoe says. “Even winning battles isn't important to you. Is it?”

Goto Dengo looks the other way, shamefaced.

“Haven't you guys figured out yet that banzai charges DON'T FUCKING WORK?”

“All of the people who learned that were killed in banzai charges,” Goto Dengo says.

As if on cue, the Nips in the left field dugout begin screaming “Banzai!” and charge, as one, out onto the field. Shaftoe puts his eye up to a bullet hole in the wall and watches them stumbling across the infield with fixed bayonets. Their leader clambers up the pitcher's mound as if he's going to plant a flag there, and takes a slug in the middle of his face. His men are being dismantled all around him by thoughtfully placed rifle slugs from the Huks' dugout. Urban warfare is not the metier of the Hukbalahaps, but calmly slaughtering banzai-charging Nipponese is old hat. One of the Nips actually manages to crawl all the way to the first base coach's box. Then a few pounds of meat come flying out of his back and he relaxes.

Shaftoe turns to see that Goto Dengo is aiming a revolver at him. He chooses to ignore this for a moment. “See what I mean?”

“I have seen it many times before.”

“Then why aren't you dead?” Shaftoe asks the question with all due flippancy, but it has a terrible effect on Goto Dengo. His face scrunches up and he begins to cry. “Aw, shit. You pull a gun on me and start bawling at the same time? How unfair can you get? Why don't you kick some fucking dirt in my eyes while you're at it?”

Goto Dengo lifts the revolver to his own temple. But Shaftoe sees that one coming a mile away. He knows Nips well enough, by this point, to figure out when they are about to go hari-kari on you. Shaftoe jumps forward as soon as the barrel of the revolver begins to move. By the time it is against Goto Dengo's skull, Shaftoe has his finger stuck into the gap between the hammer and the firing pin.

Goto Dengo collapses to the floor sobbing piteously. It just makes Shaftoe want to kick him. “Knock it off!” he says. “What the fuck is eating at you?”

“I came to Manila to redeem myself—to get back my lost honor!” Goto Dengo says. “I could have done it here. I could be dead on that field right now, and my spirit going to Yasukuni. But then—you came! You ruined my concentration!”

“Concentrate on this, dumbshit!” Shaftoe says. “My son is in a church right over on the far side of that wall, with a bunch of other helpless women and children. If you want to redeem yourself, why not help me get 'em out alive?”

Goto Dengo seems to have gone into a trance now. His face, which was blubbering just a minute ago, has solidified into a mask. “I wish I could believe what you believe,” he says. “I have died, Bobby. I was buried in a rock tomb. If I were a Christian, I could be born again now, and be a new man. Instead, I must go on living, and accept my karma.”

“Well, shit! There's a padre right out there in the dugout. He can Christianize your ass in about ten seconds flat.” Bobby Shaftoe strides across the bathroom and swings the door open.

He is startled to see a man standing just a few paces away. The man is dressed in an old but clean khaki uniform, devoid of insignia except for a pentagon of stars on the collar. He has jammed a wooden match down into the bowl of a corncob pipe and is puffing away futilely. But it's as if all of the oxygen has been sucked out of the air by the burning of the city. He throws the match away in disgust, then looks up into the face of Bobby Shaftoe—staring at him through a pair of dark aviator sunglasses that give his gaunt face the appearance of a skull. His mouth forms into an 0 for a moment. Then his jaw sets. “Shaftoe… Shaftoe! SHAFTOE!” he says.

Bobby Shaftoe feels his body stiffening to attention. Even if he had been dead for a few hours, his body would do this out of some kind of dumb ingrained reflex. “Sir, yes sir!” he says wearily.

The General composes his thoughts for half a second, and then says: “You were supposed to be in Concepcion. You failed to be there. Your superiors did not know what to think. They have been worried sick about you. And the Department of the Navy has been positively insufferable ever since they became aware that you were working for me. They assert, in the most high-handed way, that you know important secrets, and should never have been placed in danger of capture. In short, your whereabouts and your status have been the subject of the most intense, nay, feverish speculation for the last several weeks. Many supposed that you were dead, or, worse, captured. This distraction has been most unwelcome to me, inasmuch as the planning and execution of the reconquest of the Philippine Islands have left me little time to devote to such nagging distractions.” An artillery shell rips through the air and detonates in the bleachers, sending jagged fragments of planks, about the size of canoe paddles, whirling through the air all around them. One of them embeds itself like a javelin in the dirt between The General and Bobby Shaftoe.