Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

Doug Shaftoe says, “You haven't answered Enoch's question yet, Randy: what good are you doing your shareholders here?”

A red dragonfly hovers above a backwater of the stream, its wings moving so fast that the eye sees not wings in movement but a probability distribution of where the wings might be, like electron orbitals: a quantum-mechanical effect that maybe explains why the insect can apparently teleport from one place to another, disappearing from one point and reappearing a couple of meters away, without seeming to pass through the space in between. There sure is a lot of bright stuff in the jungle. Randy figures that, in the natural world, anything that is colored so brightly must be some kind of serious evolutionary badass.

“We took the gold that you recovered from the submarine and turned it into electronic cash, right?” Randy says.

“So you claimed. I haven't actually spent any of that electronic cash yet,” says Doug.

“We want to do the same thing for the Church—or Wing—or whoever ends up in possession of the gold. We want to deposit it in the Crypt, and make it usable as electronic currency.”

Amy asks, “Do you understand that, in order to move the gold out of here, it'll be necessary to travel across land controlled by Wing?”

“Who says we have to move it?”

Silence for a minute, or what passes for silence in a jungle.

Doug Shaftoe says, “You're right. If the stories are even half true, this facility is far more secure than any bank vault.”

“The stories are all true—and then some,” Randy says. “The man who designed and built Golgotha is Goto Dengo himself.”

“Shit!”

“He drew plans of it for us. And the larger issue of local and national security is not a problem here,” Randy adds. “Of course the government has sometimes been unstable. But any invader who wants to physically seize possession of the gold will have to fight his way across this jungle with tens of millions of heavily armed Filipinos barring his path.”

“Everyone knows what the Huks did against the Nips,” Doug says, nodding vigorously. “Or the VC against us, for that matter. No one would be stupid enough to try it.”

“Especially if we put you in charge, Doug.”

Amy's been woolgathering through most of the conversation, but at this she turns and grins at her father.

“I accept,” Doug says.

Randy's slowly becoming aware that most of the birds and bugs who live here move so fast that you can't even turn your head fast enough to center them in your vision. They exist only as slicing movements in your peripheral vision. The only exception would seem to be a species of gnat that has evolved into the specific niche of plunging into the left eyeballs of human beings at something just under the speed of sound. Randy has taken about four hits in the left eye, none in the right. He takes another one now, and as he's recovering from it, the earth jumps underneath them. It is a little like an earthquake in its psychological effect: a feeling of disbelief, and then betrayal, that the solid ground is having the temerity to move around. But it's all over by the time the sensation has moved up their spines to their brains. The river's still running, and the dragonfly is still hunting.

“That felt exactly like high explosive going off,” says Doug Shaftoe, “but I didn't hear anything. Did anyone hear anything?”

No one heard anything.

“What that means,” Doug continues, “is that someone is setting off explosives deep underground.”

They start working their way up the riverbed. Randy's GPS indicates that Golgotha is less than two thousand meters upstream. The river begins to develop proper banks that get steadily higher and steeper. John Wayne clambers up onto the left bank and Jackie Woo onto the right, so that the high ground on either side will be guarded, or at least reconnoitered. They pass back into the shade of the canopy. The ground here is some kind of sedimentary rock with granite boulders embedded in it from place to place, like mixed nuts in half-melted chocolate. It must be nothing more than a scab of congealed ash and sediment on top of an underlying monolith of hard rock. Those who are down in the streambed move very slowly now. Part of the time they are down in the river, struggling upstream against a powerful current, and part of the time they are picking their way from boulder to boulder, or sidestepping, along crumbling ledges of harder rock that protrude from the banks here and there. Every few minutes, Doug looks up and makes visual contact with Jackie Woo and John Wayne—who must be contending with challenges of their own, because sometimes they fall behind the main group. The trees only seem to get higher as they work their way up into the mountains, and now their height is accentuated by the fact that they are rooted in the top of a bank that rises above the stream two, five, ten, then twenty and thirty meters. The bank actually overhangs them now: the river's gorge is a tube mostly buried in the earth, open to the sky only through a narrow slot in the top. But it's close to midday and the sun is shining nearly straight down through it, illuminating all of the stuff that makes its way down from the heights. The corpse of a murdered insect drifts down from the upper canopy like winter's first snowflake. Water seeping from the rims of the overhanging bank forms a drip curtain, each drop glittering like a diamond and making it nearly impossible to see the dark cavity behind. Yellow butterflies weave among those falling drops but never get hit.

They come around a gentle bend in the river and are confronted by a waterfall some twenty meters high. At the base of the falls there's a still and relatively shallow pool, filling the bottom of a broad melon-shaped cavity formed by the concave, overhanging banks. The vertical sun beams straight down on the cloud of white foam at the base of the falls, which radiates the light back at blinding power, forming a sort of natural light fixture that illuminates the whole inside of the cavity. The stone walls, sweating and dripping and running with groundwater, glisten in its light. The undersides of the ferns and big-leaved plants—epiphytes—sprouting from invisible footholds in the walls flicker and dapple in the weirdly bluish foam-glow.

Most of the cavity's walls are hidden behind vegetation: fragile, cascading veils of moss growing from the rock, and vines depending from the branches of the trees hundreds of feet above them and dangling halfway down into the gorge, where they have become entangled with protruding tree roots and formed a natural trellis for a finer network of creepers that is itself the warp and woof of a matted carpet of moss saturated with flowing ground water. The gorge is alive with butterflies burning with colors of radioactive purity, and down closer to the rustling water are damselflies, mostly black with aqua bodies that flash in the sun—their wings revealing glimpses of salmon and coral-red on the underside as they orbit around each other. But mostly the air is filled with this continual slow progress of things that didn't survive, making their way down through the column of air and into the water, which flushes them away: dead leaves and the exoskeletons of insects, sucked dry and eviscerated in some silent combat hundreds of feet above their heads.

Randy's keeping an eye on the display of his GPS, which has been having a hard time locking onto any satellites down in this gorge. But finally some numbers come up. He has it calculate the distance from here to Golgotha, and the answer comes up immediately: a long row of zeroes with a few insignificant digits trailing off the end.

Randy says, “This is it.” But most of what he says is obscured by a sharp explosion from high above them on the bank. A few seconds later, a man begins to scream.