Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

“I have the coordinates of Golgotha here in my briefcase,” Rudy says. “But I know for certain that they are not written down anywhere else in V-Million.”

“You know that because you're the one who decrypted that message.”

“Yes. Maybe I should burn the message now.”

“It would kill us,” Bischoff says, “but at least we would die with some warmth and some light.”

“You are going to be on a sandy beach, sunning yourself, in a few hours, Günter,” Rudy says.

“Stop it!”

“I made a promise which I intend to keep,” Rudy says. There is a movement in the water, the strangled splash of a kicking foot being drawn under the surface.

“Rudy? Rudy?” Bischoff says. But he is alone in a black dome of silence.

A minute later a hand grips his ankle.

Rudy climbs up his body like a ladder and thrusts his head above the surface and howls for air. But this air is the good stuff, sixteen times as much oxygen in a single lungful. He feels better quickly. Bischoff holds him while he calms down.

“The hatch is open,” Rudy says. “I saw light through it. The sun is up, Günter!”

“Let's go, then!”

“You go. I'll stay and burn the message.” Rudy's opening his briefcase again, feeling through papers with his hands, taking something out, closing the briefcase again.

Bischoff cannot move.

“I strike the match in thirty seconds,” Rudy says.

Bischoff launches himself towards Rudy's voice and wraps his arms around him in the dark.

“I'll find the others,” Bischoff says. “I'll tell them that some fucking American spy is onto us. And we'll get that gold first, and we'll keep it out of their hands.”

“Go!” Rudy cries. “I want everything to happen fast now.”

Bischoff kisses him once on each cheek and then dives.

Ahead of him is faint blue-green light, coming from no particular direction.

Rudy swam to the hatch, opened it, and swam back, and was almost dead when he returned. Bischoff has to find that hatch and then swim all the way to the surface. He knows that it will be impossible.

But then much brighter, warmer light floods the interior of the V Million. Bischoff looks back and up, and sees the forward end of the pressure hull turned into a dome of orange fire, the silhouette of a man centered in it, lines of welds and rivets spreading away from that center like the meridians of a globe. It's bright as day. He turns around and swims easily away down the gangway, into the control room, and finds the hatch: a disk of cyan light.

A life-ring is pressed up against what is now the ceiling of this room. He grabs it and wrestles it down into the middle of the cabin, then shoves it before him through the hatch, and kicks his way through.

There's coral all around him, and it's beautiful. He'd love to stay and sightsee, but he's got responsibilities above. He keeps a grip on the life preserver, and although he doesn't feel himself moving, he sees the coral dropping away below. There's a big grey thing lying on it, bubbling and bleeding, and this gets smaller and smaller, like a rocket flying away into the sky.

He looks up into the water that is streaming over his face. Both of Bischoff's arms are above his head, gripping the rim of the life-ring, and he sees a disk of sunlight through it, getting brighter and redder as he ascends.

His knees begin to hurt.

The rest of it all seems like history to Randall Lawrence Waterhouse. He knows that technically speaking it is the present, and all of the really important stuff is future. But what's important to him is finished and settled. He would like to get on with his life, now that he's got one.

They carry Amy back to the missionary compound and the doctor who is there does some work on her leg, but they can't get her out to the hospital in Manila because Wing has blockaded them in there. This ought to seem threatening, but actually just seems stupid and annoying to them after they've had a little while to get used to it. The people who are doing it are Chinese Communist geronto-apparatchiks backed up by a few bootlicking cronies within the local government, and none of them has the slightest appreciation of things like encrypted spread-spectrum packet radio, which makes it easy for people like Doug and Randy to communicate with the outside world and explain precisely what is going on. Randy's blood type is compatible with Amy's and so he lets the doctor suck him nearly dry. The lack of blood seemingly halves his IQ for a day or two, but even so, when he sees Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe drawing up the shopping list of men and gear that they need to dig up Golgotha, he has enough presence of mind to say: strike all of that stuff. Forget the trucks and jackhammers and dynamite, the end-loaders and excavators and tunnel-boring machines, and just give me a drill, a couple of pumps, and a few thousand gallons of fuel oil. Doug gets it right away, as indeed how could he not, since he basically gave Randy the idea by telling him old war legends about his father. They get the shopping list out to Avi and Goto Dengo with no trouble at all.

Wing keeps them blockaded in the compound for a week; the subterranean explosions continue to shake the earth; Amy's leg gets infected and the doctor comes this close to sawing it off to save her life. Enoch Root spends some time alone with her and suddenly her leg gets a lot better. He explains that he applied a local folk remedy, but Amy refuses to say anything about it.

Meanwhile the rest of them kill time by clearing mines from around Golgotha, and trying to localize those explosions. The verdict seems to be that Wing still has most of a kilometer of hard rock to tunnel through in order to get access to Golgotha, and he's only making a few dozen meters per day.

They know that all hell is breaking loose in the outside world because media and military helicopters keep flying over the place. One day a Goto Engineering chopper lands in the compound. It's got earth-imaging sonar gear, and more importantly it's got antibiotics, which have a nearly magical impact on the jungle bugs in Amy's leg, which have never even met penicillin, much less this state-of-the-art stuff that makes penicillin look like chicken noodle soup. Amy's fever breaks in a couple of hours and she's hobbling within a day. The road gets opened up again and then their problem becomes trying to keep people out—it is jammed with media, opportunistic gold-seekers, and nerds. All of them apparently think they are present at some kind of radical societal watershed, as if global society has gotten so screwed up that the only thing to do is shut down and reboot it.

Randy sees people holding up banners with his name on them, and tries not to think about what this implies. The truckloads of equipment almost cannot make it through this traffic jam, but they do, and there's another really frustrating and tedious week of hauling all of the shit through the jungle. Randy spends most of his time hanging around with the earth-imaging sonar crew; they have this very cool gear that Goto Engineering uses to do CAT scans of the earth that they are about to dig into. By the time all of the heavy equipment is in place, Randy's got the entirety of Golgotha imaged down to a resolution of about a meter; he could fly through it in virtual reality if he were into that kind of thing. As it is, all he needs is to decide where to drill his three holes: two from the top down into the main vault, and then one from the side, coming in almost horizontally from the riverbank, but at a gentle upward angle, until it enters what he thinks is the lowest sump in the main chamber. The drain hole.

Someone arrives from the outside world and convinces Randy he's on the cover of both Time and Newsweek. Randy doesn't consider it to be good news. He knows that he's got a new life. He had a particular mental image of what that new life is: mostly, being married to Amy and minding his own business until he dies of old age. It did not enter his calculations that being on the cover of newsweeklies, and people standing in the jungle holding banners with his name on them, would in any way characterize his life. Now he never wants to leave the jungle.