Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

So this is it then. This is the setup. This is the deal. It is all very clean and simple. Randy fires up the laptop just to prove that it still works. Then he makes his bed and goes and lies down on it, just because it feels really good to lie down. It is the first time he's had anything like privacy in at least a week. Notwithstanding Avi's bizarre admonition against self-abuse on the beach in Pacifica, it is high time that Randy took care of something. He needs to concentrate really hard now, and a certain distraction must be done away with. Replaying his last conversation with Amy is enough to give him a good erection. He reaches down into his pants and then abruptly falls asleep.

He wakes up to the sound of the cellblock door clanging open. A new prisoner is being led in. Randy tries to sit up and finds that his hand is still in his pants, having failed to accomplish its mission. He pulls it out of there reluctantly and sits up. He swings his feet down off the bed and onto the stone floor. Now he's got his back to the adjacent cell, which is a mirror image of his; i.e., the beds and the toilets of the two cells are right next to each other along their shared partition. He stands up and turns around and watches this other prisoner being led into the cell next to his. The new guy is a white man, probably in his sixties, maybe even seventies, though you could make a case for fifties or eighties. Quite vigorous, anyway. He's wearing a prison coverall just like Randy's, but accessorized differently: instead of a laptop, he's got a crucifix dangling from a rosary with great big fat amber beads, and some sort of medallion on a silver chain, and he's clutching several books to his belly: a Bible, and something big and in German, and a current bestselling novel.

The guards are treating him with extreme reverence; Randy assumes the guy is a priest. They are talking to him in Tagalog, asking him questions—being, Randy thinks, solicitous to his needs and desires—and the white man answers them in reassuring tones and even tells a joke. He makes a polite request; a guard scurries out and returns moments later with a deck of cards. Finally the guards back out of the cell, practically bowing and scraping, and lock him in with apologies that start to get a little monotonous. The white man says something, forgiving them wittily. They laugh nervously and leave. The white man stands there in the middle of his cell for a minute, staring at the floor contemplatively, maybe praying or something. Then he snaps out of it and starts looking around. Randy leans into the partition and sticks his hand through the bars. “Randy Waterhouse,” he says.

The white man frisbees his books onto the bed, glides towards him, and shakes his hand. “Enoch Root,” he says. “It's a pleasure to meet you in person, Randy.” His voice is unmistakably that of Pontifex—root@eruditorum.org.

Randy freezes up for a long time, like a man who has just realized that a colossal practical joke is being played on him, but doesn't know just how colossal it is, or what to do about it. Enoch Root sees that Randy is paralyzed, and steps smoothly into the gap. He flexes the deck of cards in one hand and shoots them across to the other; the queue of airborne cards just hangs there between his hands for a moment, like an accordion. “Not as versatile as ETC cards, but surprisingly useful,” he muses. “With any luck, Randy, you and I can make a bridge—as long as you are just standing there pontificating anyway.”

“Make a bridge?” Randy echoes, feeling and probably sounding rather stupid.

“I'm sorry, my English is a bit rusty—I meant bridge as in a card game. Are you familiar with it?”

“Bridge? No. But I thought it took four people.”

“I have come up with a version that is played by two. I only hope this deck is complete—the game requires fifty-four cards.”

“Fifty-four,” Randy muses. “Is your game anything like Pontifex?”

“One and the same.”

“I think I have the rules for Pontifex squirreled away on my hard drive somewhere,” Randy says.

“Then let's play,” says Enoch Root.

Shaftoe jumps out of the airplane. The air is bracingly cold up here, and the wind chill factor is something else. It is the first time in a year that he has not been loathsomely hot and sweaty.

Something jerks mightily on his back: the static line, still attached to the airplane—God forbid that American fighting men should be entrusted to pull their own ripcords. He can just imagine the staff meeting where they dreamed up the concept of the static line: “For God's sake, General, they're just enlisted men! As soon as they jump out of the airplane they'll probably start daydreaming about their girlfriends, take a few hits from their pocket flasks, catch forty winks, and before you know it they'll all pile into the ground at a couple of hundred miles an hour!”

The drogue chute flutters out, catches air, and then eviscerates his main pack in one jerk. There's a bit of flopping and buffeting as Bobby Shaftoe's body pulls the disorganized cloud of silk downwards, then it thunks open and he is left hanging in space, his dark body forming a small perfect bullseye in the center of the off-white canopy for any Nipponese riflemen down below.

No wonder those paratroopers think they are gods among men: they get such a nice view of things, so much better than a poor Marine grunt stuck down on the beach, who is always looking uphill into courses of pillboxes. All of Luzon stretches out before him. He can see one or two hundred miles north, across a mat of vegetation as dense as felt, to the mountains in the far north where General Yamashita, the Lion of Malaya, is holed up with a hundred thousand troops, each of whom would like nothing better than to strap lots of explosives to his body, sneak through the lines at night, run into the middle of a large concentration of American soldiers, and blow himself up for his emperor. To Shaftoe's starboard is Manila Bay, and even from this distance, some thirty miles, he can see the jungle suddenly turn thin and brown as it nears the shore, like a severed leaf that is dying from the edge inwards—that would be what's left of the city of Manila. The fat twenty-mile-long tongue of land protruding towards him is Bata'an. Just off the tip of it is a rocky island shaped like a tadpole with a green head and a bony brown tail: Corregidor. Smoke jets from many vents on the island, which has been mostly reconquered by the Americans. Quite a few Nipponese blew themselves up in their underground bunkers rather than surrender. This heroic act has given someone in The General's chain of command a nifty idea.

A couple of miles from Corregidor, motionless on the water, is something that looks like an absurdly squat, asymmetrical battleship, except much bigger. It is encircled by American gunboats and amphibious landing forces. From a source on its lid, a long wisp of red smoke trickles downwind: a smoke bomb dropped out of Shaftoe's plane a few minutes ago, on a parachute. As Shaftoe descends, and the wind blows him directly towards it, he can see the grain of the reinforced concrete of which this prodigy is made. It used to be a dry rock in Manila Bay. The Spanish built a fort there, the Americans built a chain of gun emplacements on top of that, and when the Nips showed up they turned the entire thing into a solid reinforced-concrete fortress with walls thirty feet thick, and a couple of double-barreled fourteen-inch gun turrets on the top. Those guns have long since been silenced; Shaftoe can see long cracks in their barrels, and craters, like frozen splashes in the steel. Even though he is parachuting onto the roof of an impregnable Nipponese fortress chock-full of heavily armed men who are desperately looking for a picturesque way to die, Shaftoe is perfectly safe; every time a Nip pokes a rifle barrel or a pair of binoculars out of a gun slit, half a dozen American antiaircraft gunners open up on him at point-blank range from the nearby ships.