- Location
- The Void
- Pronouns
- She/Her
How are our options limited? Like what will it change dramatically?
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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
- Start date
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- Tags
- naruto rationalist romance armageddon is looking better and better damn you kishimoto explosions everywhere explosives solve everyone if in doubt surrender to the mercy of zabuza it seemed like a good idea at the time looks like a really bad case of being a jōnin my god. where does the lore end? precommitting is the winning plan screaming in kagome screw the rules i have explosives something bad might still happen sometimes you gotta sociopath stabby zabby subsection c of paragraph 9 should include we can weaponize this so hard
How are our options limited? Like what will it change dramatically?
Because the vote will happen before the war, and the war will start before we're declared Leaf nin, and we can't do lots of things like going out as a group or visiting Akane, for example, before we're declared Leaf nin.
Also, on a meta level, some people are opposed to doing research before the vote, on the idea that it could negatively influence the outcome (somehow), and I want us to actually do some research, but I'd prefer not to start that argument with the people that are against it. So waiting until after the vote is the best play there, and timeskipping until it's happened is the most efficient way of doing that.
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Mostly only minor editing. Added a point or two.
Looking for justu ideas we could learn, should only spend 1 EXP to learn it.
@Velorien @eaglejarl @OliWhail
So, do we get a salary or do we have to do actual missions?
I imagine that Noburi will be paid a salary for doing research. However, I don't know what the rest of the team will do, except sell ice and sell seals.
So, do we get a salary or do we have to do actual missions?
I imagine that Noburi will be paid a salary for doing research. However, I don't know what the rest of the team will do, except sell ice and sell seals.
Two hundred.
Implemented suggestion. Hazō will do original research only after the Clan Council Meeting(tm). Kagome-sensei and Jiraiya should be working on improving the skywalker seals. Added macerator.
I have no idea if we want to crank out 200 macerators in one sitting, or do little by little each day, or how long will that take.
I'm pretty sure that after the clan council meeting will be beyond this update, so not sure why we're putting in a research queue for that period.
And I still say that making a deal where we hope we'll be able to make a seal that can make ice by the time we run out is a bad idea because it means we might fail to meet our end of the bargain. For all we know we'll be pulled into some other project and not have time to do a cooling seal. Plus, you know, we should just ask Jiraiya if he's got seals for heating, cooling, or making ice before working on them.
And I still say that making a deal where we hope we'll be able to make a seal that can make ice by the time we run out is a bad idea because it means we might fail to meet our end of the bargain. For all we know we'll be pulled into some other project and not have time to do a cooling seal. Plus, you know, we should just ask Jiraiya if he's got seals for heating, cooling, or making ice before working on them.
It wasn't my intention to make the ice deal indefinite. Made it clearer.
I already had a sentence dealing with re-invented seals, unless it's not clear?
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
About 16 hours to draw blanks, probably another 16 hours to infuse all of them as well, given how Hazou and Kagome worked basically one to one on drawing/infusing Skywalkers.
- Location
- Off the Edge
You forgot the parts about throwing garbage everywhere, and broadcasting gibberish to alert
I personally think the following scene has one of the best analogies in literature.
In absolutely no way related, does Wind have computers? Did Kagome's allies bury a large amount of gold somewhere? Was Kagome involved in a conspiracy to keep the gold secret? And can he teach us the advanced cryptography to find it?
(Unless I'm seeing a reference where there is none, and none of this makes any sense)
We could spend one hour a day drawing blanks and infusing them. I do want to know what's the pay rate is though.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Assuming the QMs approve it, Hazou should be able to draw seals while doing other things using Iron Nerve. (ie game night with the team, etc.)
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
HoratioVonBecker
Imperfectly Aligned
What was the referenced to?
- Location
- Off the Edge
It's a passage from Cryptonomicon. I'll see if I can dig it up and post it later.
EDIT:
Here it is. Second half is the relevant section.
Chapter 24
LIZARD
Bobby Shaftoe and his buddies are just out for a nice little morning drive through the countryside.
In Italy.
Italy! He cannot fucking believe it. What gives?
Not his job to know. His job has been very clearly described to him. It has to be clearly described, because it makes no sense.
In the good old days, back on Guadalcanal, his commanding officer would say something like "Shaftoe, eradicate that pillbox!" and from there on out, Bobby Shaftoe was a free agent. He could walk, run, swim or crawl. He could sneak up and lob in a satchel charge, or he could stand off at a distance and hose the objective down with a flame thrower. Didn't matter as long as he accomplished the goal.
The goal of this little mission is completely beyond Shaftoe's comprehension. They awaken him; Lieutenant Enoch Root; three of the other Marines, including the radio man; and several of the SAS blokes in the middle of the night, and hustle them down to one of the few docks in Malta that hasn't been blasted away by the Luftwaffe. A submarine waits. They climb aboard and play cards for about twenty-four hours. Most of the time they are on the surface, where submarines can go a hell of a lot faster, but from time to time they dive, evidently for the best of reasons.
When next they are allowed up on the flat top of the submarine, it is the middle of the night again. They are in a little cove in a parched, rugged coastline; Shaftoe can see that much by the moonlight. Two trucks are waiting for them. They open hatches in the sub's deck and begin to take stuff out: into one of the trucks, the U.S. Marines load a bunch of cloth sacks bulging with what appears to be all kinds of trash. Meanwhile, the British Special Air Service are at work with wrenches, rags, grease and much profanity in the back of the other truck, assembling something from crates that they have brought up from another part of the submarine. This is covered up by a tarp before Shaftoe can get a good look, but he recognizes it as something you'd rather have pointed away from you.
There are a couple of dark men with mustachioes hanging around the dock smoking and arguing with the skipper of the submarine. After all of the stuff is unloaded, the skipper appears to pay them with more crates from the submarine. The men pry a couple of them open for inspection, and appear to be satisfied.
At this point Shaftoe still doesn't even know what continent they are on. When he first saw the landscape he figured Northern Africa. When he saw the men, he figured Turkey or something.
It is not until the sun comes up on their little convoy, and (lying in the back of the truck on top of the sacks of trash, peeking out from under the tarp) he is able to see road signs and Christian churches, that he realizes it has to be Italy or Spain. Finally he sees a sign pointing the way to ROMA and figures it's Italy. The sign points away from the midmorning sun, so they must be somewhere south or southeast of Rome. They are also south of some burg called Napoli.
But he doesn't spend a lot of time looking. It is not encouraged. The truck is being driven by some fellow who speaks the language, and who stops from time to time to converse with the natives. Some of the time this sounds like friendly banter. Sometimes it sounds like arguments over highway etiquette. Sometimes it is quieter, more guarded. Shaftoe figures out, slowly, that during these exchanges the truck driver is bribing someone to let them go through.
He finds it shocking that in a country actively embroiled in the middle of the greatest war in history–in a country run by belligerent Fascists for God's sake–two truckloads of heavily armed enemy soldiers can just drive around freely, protected by nothing except a couple of five-dollar tarps. Criminy! What kind of a sorry operation is this? He feels like leaping to his feet, casting the tarp aside, and giving these Eyties a good dressing-down. The whole place needs a good scrubbing with toothbrushes anyway. It's like these people aren't even trying. Now, the Nips, think of them what you will, at least when those guys declare war on you they mean it.
He resists the temptation to upbraid the Italians. He thinks it goes against the orders he had thoroughly memorized before the shock of figuring out that he was driving around in an Axis country jangled everything loose from his brain. And if they hadn't come from the lips of Colonel Chattan himself–the chap or bloke who's the commanding officer of Detachment 2702–he wouldn't have believed them anyway.
They are going to be putting in some bivouac time. They are going to play a lot of cards for a while. During this time, the radio man is going to be very busy. This phase of the operation might last as long as a week. At some point, it is likely that strenuous, concerted efforts to kill them will be made by a whole lot of Germans and, if they happen to be feeling impetuous that day, Italians. When this happens, they are to send out a radio message, torch the joint, drive to a certain field that passes for an airstrip, and be picked up by those jaunty SAS flyboys.
Shaftoe didn't believe a word of it at first. He pegged it as some kind of British humor thing, some kind of practical joke/hazing ritual. In general he doesn't know what to make of the Brits because they appear (in his personal observation) to be the only other people on the face of the earth, besides Americans, who possess a sense of humor. He has heard rumors that some Eastern Europeans can do it, but he hasn't met any of them, and they don't have much to yuk it up about at the moment. In any case, he can never quite make out when these Brits are joking.
Any thought that this was just a joke evaporated when he saw the quantity of armaments they were being issued. Shaftoe has found that, for an organization devoted to shooting and blowing up people on a large scale, the military is infuriatingly reticent about passing out weapons. And most of the weapons they do pass out are for shit. It is for this reason that Marines have long found it necessary to buy their own tommy guns from home: the Corps wants them to kill people, but they just won't give them the stuff they need!
But this Detachment 2702 thing is a whole different outfit. Even the grunts are carrying trench brooms! And if that didn't get their attention, the cyanide capsules sure did. And the lecture from Chattan on the correct way to blow your own head off ("you would be astonished at how many otherwise competent chaps botch this apparently simple procedure").
Now, Shaftoe realizes that there is an unspoken codicil to Chattan's orders: oh, yeah, and if any of the Italians, who actually live in Italy, and who run the place, and who are Fascists and who are at war with us–if any of them notice you and, for some reason, object to your little plan, whatever the fuck it is, then by all means kill them. And if that doesn't work, please, by all means, kill yourself, because you'll probably do a neater job of it than the Fascists will. Don't forget suntan lotion!
Actually, Shaftoe doesn't mind this mission. It is certainly no worse than Guadalcanal. What bothers him (he decides, making himself comfortable on the sacks of mysterious trash, staring up at a crack in the tarp) is not understanding the purpose of it all.
The rest of the platoon may or may not be dead; he thinks he can still hear some of them crying out, but it's hard to tell between the pounding of the incoming surf and the relentless patter of the machine gun. Then he realizes that some of them must be alive or else the Nips would not continue to fire their gun.
Shaftoe knows that he is closer to the gun than any of his buddies. He is the only one who has a chance.
It is at this point that Shaftoe makes his Big Decision. It is surprisingly easy–but then, really stupid decisions are always the easiest.
He crawls along the log to the point that is closest to the machine gun. Then he draws a few deep breaths in a row, rises to a crouch, and vaults over the log! He has a clear view of the cave entrance now, the comet-shaped muzzle flash of the machine gun tesselated by the black grid of the net that they put up to reject incoming grenades. It is all remarkably clear. He looks back over the beach and sees motionless corpses.
Suddenly he realizes they are still firing the gun, not because any of his buddies are alive, but to use up all of their excess ammunition so that they will not have to pack it out. Shaftoe is a grunt, and understands.
Then the muzzle swings abruptly towards him–he has been sighted. He is in the clear, totally exposed. He can dive into the jungle foliage, but they will sweep it with fire until he is dead. Bobby Shaftoe plants his feet, aims his .45 into the cave, and begins pulling the trigger. The barrel of the machine gun is pointing at him now.
But it does not fire.
His .45 clicks. It's empty. Everything is silent except for the surf, and for the screaming. Shaftoe holsters his .45 and pulls out his revolver.
The voice that is doing the screaming is unfamiliar. It's not one of Shaftoe's buddies.
A Nipponese Imperial Marine bolts from the mouth of the cave, up above the level of Shaftoe's head. The pupil of Shaftoe's right eye, the sights of his revolver, and this Nip are all arranged briefly along the same line for a moment, during which Shaftoe pulls the trigger a couple of times and almost certainly scores a hit.
The Imperial Marine gets caught in the netting and plunges to the ground in front of him.
A second Nip dives out of the cave a moment later, grunting incoherently, apparently speechless with horror. He lands wrong and breaks one of his leg bones; Shaftoe can hear it snap. He begins running towards the surf anyway, hobbling grotesquely on the bad leg. He completely ignores Shaftoe. There is terrible bleeding from his neck and shoulder, and loose chunks of flesh flopping around as he runs.
Bobby Shaftoe holsters his revolver. He ought to shoulder his rifle and plug the guy, but he is too confused to do anything for the moment.
Something red flickers in the mouth of the cave. He glances up that way and sees nothing clear enough to register against the deafening visual noise of the jungle.
Then he sees the flash of red again, and it disappears again. It was shaped like a sharpened Y. It was shaped like the forked tongue of a reptile.
Then a moving slab of living jungle explodes from the mouth of the cave and crashes into the foliage below. The tops of the plants shake and topple as it moves.
It is out, free and clear, on the beach. It is low to the ground, moving on all fours. It pauses for a moment and flicks its tongue towards the Imperial Marine who is now hobbling into the Pacific Ocean some fifty feet distant.
Sand erupts into the air, like smoke from the burning tires of a drag racer, and the lizard is rocketing across the beach. It covers the distance to the Imperial Marine in one, two, three seconds, takes him in the backs of the knees, takes him down hard into the surf. Then the lizard is dragging the dead Nip back up onto the land. It stretches him out there among the dead Americans, walks around him a couple of times, flicking its tongue, and finally starts to eat him.
"Sarge! We're here!" says Private Flanagan. Before he even wakes up, Bobby Shaftoe notices that Flanagan is speaking in a normal voice and does not sound scared or excited. Wherever "here" is, it's not someplace dangerous. They are not under attack.
Shaftoe opens his eyes just as the tarp is being peeled back from the open top of the truck. He stares straight up into a blue Italian sky torn around the edges by the scrabbling branches of desperate trees. "Shit!" he says.
"What's wrong, Sarge?"
"I just always say that when I wake up," Shaftoe says.
Their new home turns out to be an old stone farm building in an olive farm, plantation, orchard or whatever the fuck you call a place where olives are grown. If this building were in Wisconsin, any cheesehead who passed by would peg it as abandoned. Here, Shaftoe is not so sure. The roof has partly collapsed into the building under the killing weight of its red clay tiles, and the windows and doorways yawn, open to the elements. It's a big structure, big enough that after several hours of sledgehammer work they are able to drive one of the trucks inside and conceal it from airborne snoops. They unload the sacks of trash from the other truck. Then the Italian guy drives it away and never comes back.
Corporal Benjamin, the radio man, gets busy clambering up olive trees and stringing copper wires around the place. The blokes of the SAS go out and reconnoiter while the guys of the Marine Corps open the sacks of trash and start spreading them around. There are several months' worth of Italian newspapers. All of them have been opened, rearranged, haphazardly refolded. Articles have been torn out, other articles circled or annotated in pencil. Chattan's orders are beginning to filter back into Shaftoe's brain; he heaps these newspapers in the corners of the barn, oldest ones first, newer ones on top.
There is a whole sack filled with cigarette butts, carefully smoked to the nub. They are of a Continental brand unfamiliar to Shaftoe. Like a farmer broadcasting seeds, he carries this sack around the premises tossing handfuls onto the ground, concentrating mostly on places where people will actually work: Corporal Benjamin's table and another makeshift table they have set up for eating and playing poker. Likewise with a salad of wine corks and beer caps. An equal number of wine and beer bottles are flung, one by one, into a dark and unused corner of the barn. Bobby Shaftoe can see that this is the most satisfying work he will ever get, so he takes it over, and flings those bottles like a Green Bay Packer quarterback firing spiral passes into the sure hands of his plucky tight ends.
The blokes come back from reconnoitering and there is a swappage of roles; the Marines now go out to familiarize themselves with the territory while the SAS continue unloading garbage. In an hour's worth of wandering around, Sergeant Shaftoe and Privates Flanagan and Kuehl determine that this olive ranch is on a long skinny shelf of land that runs roughly north–south. To the west, the territory rises up steeply toward a conical peak that looks suspiciously like a volcano. To the east, it drops, after a few miles, down towards the sea. To the north, the plateau dead-ends in some nasty, impassable scrubland, and to the south it opens up on more farming territory.
Chattan wanted him to find a vantage point on the bay, as convenient as possible to the barn. Toward sunset, Shaftoe finds it: a rocky outcropping on the slopes of the volcano, half an hour's walk northeast of the barn and maybe five hundred feet above it in altitude.
He and his Marines almost don't find their way back to the barn because it has been so well hidden by this point. The SAS have put up blackout shades over every opening, even the small chinks in the collapsed roof. On the inside, they have settled in comfortably to the pockets of usable space. With all of the litter (now enhanced with chicken feathers and bones, tonsorial trimmings and orange peels) it looks like they've been living there for a year, which, Shaftoe guesses, is the whole point.
Corporal Benjamin has about a third of the place to himself. The SAS blokes keep calling him a lucky sod. He has his transmitter set up now, the tubes glowing warmly, and he has an unbelievable amount of paperwork. Most of it's old and fake, just like the cigarette butts. But after dinner, when the sun is down not only here but in London, he begins tapping out the Morse code.
Shaftoe knows Morse code, like everyone else in the place. As the guys and the blokes sit around the table, anteing up for what promises to be an all-night Hearts marathon, they keep one ear cocked towards Corporal Benjamin's keying. What they hear is gibberish. Shaftoe goes and looks over Benjamin's shoulder at one point, just to verify that he isn't crazy, and sees he's right:
XYHEL ANAOG GFQPL TWPKI AOEUT
and so on and so forth, for pages and pages.
The next morning they dig a latrine and then proceed to fill it halfway with a couple of barrels of genuine U.S. Mil. Spec. General Issue 100% pure certified Shit. As per Chattan's instructions, they pour the shit in a dollop at a time, throwing in handfuls of crumpled Italian newspapers after each dollop to make it look like it got there naturally. With the possible exception of being interviewed by Lieutenant Reagan, this is the worst nonviolent job Shaftoe has ever had to do in the service of his country. He gives everyone the rest of the day off, except for Corporal Benjamin, who stays up until two in the morning banging out random gibberish.
The next day they make the observation post look good. They take turns marching up there and back, up and back, up and back, wearing a trail into the ground, and they scatter some cigarette butts and beverage containers up there along with some general issue shit and general issue piss. Flanagan and Kuehl hump a footlocker up there and hide it in the lee of a volcanic rock. The locker contains books of silhouettes of various Italian and German naval and merchant ships, and similar spotter's guides for airplanes, as well as some binoculars, telescopes, and camera equipment, empty notepads, and pencils.
Even though Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe is for the most part running this show, he finds it uncannily difficult to arrange a moment alone with Lieutenant Enoch Root. Root has been avoiding him ever since their eventful flight on the Dakota. Finally, on about the fifth day, Shaftoe tricks him; he and a small contingent leave Root alone at the observation point, then Shaftoe doubles back and traps him there.
Root is startled to see Shaftoe come back, but he doesn't get particularly upset. He lights up an Italian cigarette and offers Shaftoe one. Shaftoe finds, irritatingly enough, that he is the nervous one. Root's as cool as always.
"Okay," Shaftoe says, "what did you see? When you looked through the papers we planted on the dead butcher–what did you see?"
"They were all written in German," Root says.
"Shit!"
"Fortunately," Root continues, "I am somewhat familiar with the language."
"Oh, yeah–your mom was a Kraut, right?"
"Yes, a medical missionary," Root says, "in case that helps dispel any of your preconceptions about Germans."
"And your Dad was Dutch."
"That is correct."
"And they both ended up on Guadalcanal why?"
"To help those who were in need."
"Oh, yeah."
"I also learned some Italian along the way. There's a lot of it going around in the Church."
"Fuck me," Shaftoe exclaims.
"But my Italian is heavily informed by the Latin that my father insisted that I learn. So I would probably sound rather old-fashioned to the locals. In fact, I would probably sound like a seventeenth-century alchemist or something."
"Could you sound like a priest? They'd eat that up."
"If worse comes to worst," Root allows, "I will try hitting them with some God talk and we'll see what happens."
They both puff on their cigarettes and look out across the large body of water before them, which Shaftoe has learned is called the Bay of Naples. "Well anyway," Shaftoe says, "what did it say on those papers?"
"A lot of detailed information about military convoys between Palermo and Tunis. Evidently stolen from classified German sources," Root says.
"Old convoys, or…"
"Convoys that were still in the future," Root says calmly. Shaftoe finishes his cigarette, and does not speak for a while. Finally he says, "Fuckin' weird." He stands up and begins walking back towards the barn.
LIZARD
Bobby Shaftoe and his buddies are just out for a nice little morning drive through the countryside.
In Italy.
Italy! He cannot fucking believe it. What gives?
Not his job to know. His job has been very clearly described to him. It has to be clearly described, because it makes no sense.
In the good old days, back on Guadalcanal, his commanding officer would say something like "Shaftoe, eradicate that pillbox!" and from there on out, Bobby Shaftoe was a free agent. He could walk, run, swim or crawl. He could sneak up and lob in a satchel charge, or he could stand off at a distance and hose the objective down with a flame thrower. Didn't matter as long as he accomplished the goal.
The goal of this little mission is completely beyond Shaftoe's comprehension. They awaken him; Lieutenant Enoch Root; three of the other Marines, including the radio man; and several of the SAS blokes in the middle of the night, and hustle them down to one of the few docks in Malta that hasn't been blasted away by the Luftwaffe. A submarine waits. They climb aboard and play cards for about twenty-four hours. Most of the time they are on the surface, where submarines can go a hell of a lot faster, but from time to time they dive, evidently for the best of reasons.
When next they are allowed up on the flat top of the submarine, it is the middle of the night again. They are in a little cove in a parched, rugged coastline; Shaftoe can see that much by the moonlight. Two trucks are waiting for them. They open hatches in the sub's deck and begin to take stuff out: into one of the trucks, the U.S. Marines load a bunch of cloth sacks bulging with what appears to be all kinds of trash. Meanwhile, the British Special Air Service are at work with wrenches, rags, grease and much profanity in the back of the other truck, assembling something from crates that they have brought up from another part of the submarine. This is covered up by a tarp before Shaftoe can get a good look, but he recognizes it as something you'd rather have pointed away from you.
There are a couple of dark men with mustachioes hanging around the dock smoking and arguing with the skipper of the submarine. After all of the stuff is unloaded, the skipper appears to pay them with more crates from the submarine. The men pry a couple of them open for inspection, and appear to be satisfied.
At this point Shaftoe still doesn't even know what continent they are on. When he first saw the landscape he figured Northern Africa. When he saw the men, he figured Turkey or something.
It is not until the sun comes up on their little convoy, and (lying in the back of the truck on top of the sacks of trash, peeking out from under the tarp) he is able to see road signs and Christian churches, that he realizes it has to be Italy or Spain. Finally he sees a sign pointing the way to ROMA and figures it's Italy. The sign points away from the midmorning sun, so they must be somewhere south or southeast of Rome. They are also south of some burg called Napoli.
But he doesn't spend a lot of time looking. It is not encouraged. The truck is being driven by some fellow who speaks the language, and who stops from time to time to converse with the natives. Some of the time this sounds like friendly banter. Sometimes it sounds like arguments over highway etiquette. Sometimes it is quieter, more guarded. Shaftoe figures out, slowly, that during these exchanges the truck driver is bribing someone to let them go through.
He finds it shocking that in a country actively embroiled in the middle of the greatest war in history–in a country run by belligerent Fascists for God's sake–two truckloads of heavily armed enemy soldiers can just drive around freely, protected by nothing except a couple of five-dollar tarps. Criminy! What kind of a sorry operation is this? He feels like leaping to his feet, casting the tarp aside, and giving these Eyties a good dressing-down. The whole place needs a good scrubbing with toothbrushes anyway. It's like these people aren't even trying. Now, the Nips, think of them what you will, at least when those guys declare war on you they mean it.
He resists the temptation to upbraid the Italians. He thinks it goes against the orders he had thoroughly memorized before the shock of figuring out that he was driving around in an Axis country jangled everything loose from his brain. And if they hadn't come from the lips of Colonel Chattan himself–the chap or bloke who's the commanding officer of Detachment 2702–he wouldn't have believed them anyway.
They are going to be putting in some bivouac time. They are going to play a lot of cards for a while. During this time, the radio man is going to be very busy. This phase of the operation might last as long as a week. At some point, it is likely that strenuous, concerted efforts to kill them will be made by a whole lot of Germans and, if they happen to be feeling impetuous that day, Italians. When this happens, they are to send out a radio message, torch the joint, drive to a certain field that passes for an airstrip, and be picked up by those jaunty SAS flyboys.
Shaftoe didn't believe a word of it at first. He pegged it as some kind of British humor thing, some kind of practical joke/hazing ritual. In general he doesn't know what to make of the Brits because they appear (in his personal observation) to be the only other people on the face of the earth, besides Americans, who possess a sense of humor. He has heard rumors that some Eastern Europeans can do it, but he hasn't met any of them, and they don't have much to yuk it up about at the moment. In any case, he can never quite make out when these Brits are joking.
Any thought that this was just a joke evaporated when he saw the quantity of armaments they were being issued. Shaftoe has found that, for an organization devoted to shooting and blowing up people on a large scale, the military is infuriatingly reticent about passing out weapons. And most of the weapons they do pass out are for shit. It is for this reason that Marines have long found it necessary to buy their own tommy guns from home: the Corps wants them to kill people, but they just won't give them the stuff they need!
But this Detachment 2702 thing is a whole different outfit. Even the grunts are carrying trench brooms! And if that didn't get their attention, the cyanide capsules sure did. And the lecture from Chattan on the correct way to blow your own head off ("you would be astonished at how many otherwise competent chaps botch this apparently simple procedure").
Now, Shaftoe realizes that there is an unspoken codicil to Chattan's orders: oh, yeah, and if any of the Italians, who actually live in Italy, and who run the place, and who are Fascists and who are at war with us–if any of them notice you and, for some reason, object to your little plan, whatever the fuck it is, then by all means kill them. And if that doesn't work, please, by all means, kill yourself, because you'll probably do a neater job of it than the Fascists will. Don't forget suntan lotion!
Actually, Shaftoe doesn't mind this mission. It is certainly no worse than Guadalcanal. What bothers him (he decides, making himself comfortable on the sacks of mysterious trash, staring up at a crack in the tarp) is not understanding the purpose of it all.
The rest of the platoon may or may not be dead; he thinks he can still hear some of them crying out, but it's hard to tell between the pounding of the incoming surf and the relentless patter of the machine gun. Then he realizes that some of them must be alive or else the Nips would not continue to fire their gun.
Shaftoe knows that he is closer to the gun than any of his buddies. He is the only one who has a chance.
It is at this point that Shaftoe makes his Big Decision. It is surprisingly easy–but then, really stupid decisions are always the easiest.
He crawls along the log to the point that is closest to the machine gun. Then he draws a few deep breaths in a row, rises to a crouch, and vaults over the log! He has a clear view of the cave entrance now, the comet-shaped muzzle flash of the machine gun tesselated by the black grid of the net that they put up to reject incoming grenades. It is all remarkably clear. He looks back over the beach and sees motionless corpses.
Suddenly he realizes they are still firing the gun, not because any of his buddies are alive, but to use up all of their excess ammunition so that they will not have to pack it out. Shaftoe is a grunt, and understands.
Then the muzzle swings abruptly towards him–he has been sighted. He is in the clear, totally exposed. He can dive into the jungle foliage, but they will sweep it with fire until he is dead. Bobby Shaftoe plants his feet, aims his .45 into the cave, and begins pulling the trigger. The barrel of the machine gun is pointing at him now.
But it does not fire.
His .45 clicks. It's empty. Everything is silent except for the surf, and for the screaming. Shaftoe holsters his .45 and pulls out his revolver.
The voice that is doing the screaming is unfamiliar. It's not one of Shaftoe's buddies.
A Nipponese Imperial Marine bolts from the mouth of the cave, up above the level of Shaftoe's head. The pupil of Shaftoe's right eye, the sights of his revolver, and this Nip are all arranged briefly along the same line for a moment, during which Shaftoe pulls the trigger a couple of times and almost certainly scores a hit.
The Imperial Marine gets caught in the netting and plunges to the ground in front of him.
A second Nip dives out of the cave a moment later, grunting incoherently, apparently speechless with horror. He lands wrong and breaks one of his leg bones; Shaftoe can hear it snap. He begins running towards the surf anyway, hobbling grotesquely on the bad leg. He completely ignores Shaftoe. There is terrible bleeding from his neck and shoulder, and loose chunks of flesh flopping around as he runs.
Bobby Shaftoe holsters his revolver. He ought to shoulder his rifle and plug the guy, but he is too confused to do anything for the moment.
Something red flickers in the mouth of the cave. He glances up that way and sees nothing clear enough to register against the deafening visual noise of the jungle.
Then he sees the flash of red again, and it disappears again. It was shaped like a sharpened Y. It was shaped like the forked tongue of a reptile.
Then a moving slab of living jungle explodes from the mouth of the cave and crashes into the foliage below. The tops of the plants shake and topple as it moves.
It is out, free and clear, on the beach. It is low to the ground, moving on all fours. It pauses for a moment and flicks its tongue towards the Imperial Marine who is now hobbling into the Pacific Ocean some fifty feet distant.
Sand erupts into the air, like smoke from the burning tires of a drag racer, and the lizard is rocketing across the beach. It covers the distance to the Imperial Marine in one, two, three seconds, takes him in the backs of the knees, takes him down hard into the surf. Then the lizard is dragging the dead Nip back up onto the land. It stretches him out there among the dead Americans, walks around him a couple of times, flicking its tongue, and finally starts to eat him.
"Sarge! We're here!" says Private Flanagan. Before he even wakes up, Bobby Shaftoe notices that Flanagan is speaking in a normal voice and does not sound scared or excited. Wherever "here" is, it's not someplace dangerous. They are not under attack.
Shaftoe opens his eyes just as the tarp is being peeled back from the open top of the truck. He stares straight up into a blue Italian sky torn around the edges by the scrabbling branches of desperate trees. "Shit!" he says.
"What's wrong, Sarge?"
"I just always say that when I wake up," Shaftoe says.
Their new home turns out to be an old stone farm building in an olive farm, plantation, orchard or whatever the fuck you call a place where olives are grown. If this building were in Wisconsin, any cheesehead who passed by would peg it as abandoned. Here, Shaftoe is not so sure. The roof has partly collapsed into the building under the killing weight of its red clay tiles, and the windows and doorways yawn, open to the elements. It's a big structure, big enough that after several hours of sledgehammer work they are able to drive one of the trucks inside and conceal it from airborne snoops. They unload the sacks of trash from the other truck. Then the Italian guy drives it away and never comes back.
Corporal Benjamin, the radio man, gets busy clambering up olive trees and stringing copper wires around the place. The blokes of the SAS go out and reconnoiter while the guys of the Marine Corps open the sacks of trash and start spreading them around. There are several months' worth of Italian newspapers. All of them have been opened, rearranged, haphazardly refolded. Articles have been torn out, other articles circled or annotated in pencil. Chattan's orders are beginning to filter back into Shaftoe's brain; he heaps these newspapers in the corners of the barn, oldest ones first, newer ones on top.
There is a whole sack filled with cigarette butts, carefully smoked to the nub. They are of a Continental brand unfamiliar to Shaftoe. Like a farmer broadcasting seeds, he carries this sack around the premises tossing handfuls onto the ground, concentrating mostly on places where people will actually work: Corporal Benjamin's table and another makeshift table they have set up for eating and playing poker. Likewise with a salad of wine corks and beer caps. An equal number of wine and beer bottles are flung, one by one, into a dark and unused corner of the barn. Bobby Shaftoe can see that this is the most satisfying work he will ever get, so he takes it over, and flings those bottles like a Green Bay Packer quarterback firing spiral passes into the sure hands of his plucky tight ends.
The blokes come back from reconnoitering and there is a swappage of roles; the Marines now go out to familiarize themselves with the territory while the SAS continue unloading garbage. In an hour's worth of wandering around, Sergeant Shaftoe and Privates Flanagan and Kuehl determine that this olive ranch is on a long skinny shelf of land that runs roughly north–south. To the west, the territory rises up steeply toward a conical peak that looks suspiciously like a volcano. To the east, it drops, after a few miles, down towards the sea. To the north, the plateau dead-ends in some nasty, impassable scrubland, and to the south it opens up on more farming territory.
Chattan wanted him to find a vantage point on the bay, as convenient as possible to the barn. Toward sunset, Shaftoe finds it: a rocky outcropping on the slopes of the volcano, half an hour's walk northeast of the barn and maybe five hundred feet above it in altitude.
He and his Marines almost don't find their way back to the barn because it has been so well hidden by this point. The SAS have put up blackout shades over every opening, even the small chinks in the collapsed roof. On the inside, they have settled in comfortably to the pockets of usable space. With all of the litter (now enhanced with chicken feathers and bones, tonsorial trimmings and orange peels) it looks like they've been living there for a year, which, Shaftoe guesses, is the whole point.
Corporal Benjamin has about a third of the place to himself. The SAS blokes keep calling him a lucky sod. He has his transmitter set up now, the tubes glowing warmly, and he has an unbelievable amount of paperwork. Most of it's old and fake, just like the cigarette butts. But after dinner, when the sun is down not only here but in London, he begins tapping out the Morse code.
Shaftoe knows Morse code, like everyone else in the place. As the guys and the blokes sit around the table, anteing up for what promises to be an all-night Hearts marathon, they keep one ear cocked towards Corporal Benjamin's keying. What they hear is gibberish. Shaftoe goes and looks over Benjamin's shoulder at one point, just to verify that he isn't crazy, and sees he's right:
XYHEL ANAOG GFQPL TWPKI AOEUT
and so on and so forth, for pages and pages.
The next morning they dig a latrine and then proceed to fill it halfway with a couple of barrels of genuine U.S. Mil. Spec. General Issue 100% pure certified Shit. As per Chattan's instructions, they pour the shit in a dollop at a time, throwing in handfuls of crumpled Italian newspapers after each dollop to make it look like it got there naturally. With the possible exception of being interviewed by Lieutenant Reagan, this is the worst nonviolent job Shaftoe has ever had to do in the service of his country. He gives everyone the rest of the day off, except for Corporal Benjamin, who stays up until two in the morning banging out random gibberish.
The next day they make the observation post look good. They take turns marching up there and back, up and back, up and back, wearing a trail into the ground, and they scatter some cigarette butts and beverage containers up there along with some general issue shit and general issue piss. Flanagan and Kuehl hump a footlocker up there and hide it in the lee of a volcanic rock. The locker contains books of silhouettes of various Italian and German naval and merchant ships, and similar spotter's guides for airplanes, as well as some binoculars, telescopes, and camera equipment, empty notepads, and pencils.
Even though Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe is for the most part running this show, he finds it uncannily difficult to arrange a moment alone with Lieutenant Enoch Root. Root has been avoiding him ever since their eventful flight on the Dakota. Finally, on about the fifth day, Shaftoe tricks him; he and a small contingent leave Root alone at the observation point, then Shaftoe doubles back and traps him there.
Root is startled to see Shaftoe come back, but he doesn't get particularly upset. He lights up an Italian cigarette and offers Shaftoe one. Shaftoe finds, irritatingly enough, that he is the nervous one. Root's as cool as always.
"Okay," Shaftoe says, "what did you see? When you looked through the papers we planted on the dead butcher–what did you see?"
"They were all written in German," Root says.
"Shit!"
"Fortunately," Root continues, "I am somewhat familiar with the language."
"Oh, yeah–your mom was a Kraut, right?"
"Yes, a medical missionary," Root says, "in case that helps dispel any of your preconceptions about Germans."
"And your Dad was Dutch."
"That is correct."
"And they both ended up on Guadalcanal why?"
"To help those who were in need."
"Oh, yeah."
"I also learned some Italian along the way. There's a lot of it going around in the Church."
"Fuck me," Shaftoe exclaims.
"But my Italian is heavily informed by the Latin that my father insisted that I learn. So I would probably sound rather old-fashioned to the locals. In fact, I would probably sound like a seventeenth-century alchemist or something."
"Could you sound like a priest? They'd eat that up."
"If worse comes to worst," Root allows, "I will try hitting them with some God talk and we'll see what happens."
They both puff on their cigarettes and look out across the large body of water before them, which Shaftoe has learned is called the Bay of Naples. "Well anyway," Shaftoe says, "what did it say on those papers?"
"A lot of detailed information about military convoys between Palermo and Tunis. Evidently stolen from classified German sources," Root says.
"Old convoys, or…"
"Convoys that were still in the future," Root says calmly. Shaftoe finishes his cigarette, and does not speak for a while. Finally he says, "Fuckin' weird." He stands up and begins walking back towards the barn.
And just because I'd be doing a huge disservice to this book by not also posting this passage, here:
(feel free to skip to the big paragraphs)
Chapter 30
RAM
"Sir! Would you mind telling me where we are going, sir!"
Lieutenant Monkberg heaves a deep, quivering sigh, his rib-cage shuddering like a tin shack in a cyclone. He executes a none too snappy pushup. His hands are planted on the rim, and so this action extricates his head from the bowl, of a toilet–or "head," as it is referred to in this context: an alarmingly rundown freighter. He jerks down a strip of abrasive Euro-bumwad and wipes his mouth before looking up at Sergeant Robert Shaftoe, who has braced himself in the hatchway.
And Shaftoe does need some serious bracing, because he is carrying close to his own weight in gear. All of it was issued to him thoughtfully prepacked.
He could have left it that way. But this is not how an Eagle Scout operates. Bobby Shaftoe has gone through and unpacked all of it, spread it out on the deck, examined it, and repacked it.
This allowed Shaftoe to do some serious inferring. To be specific, he infers that the men of Detachment 2702 are expected to spend most of the next three weeks trying as hard as they can not to freeze to death. This will be punctuated by trying to kill a lot of well-armed sons of bitches. German, most likely.
"N-N-N-Norway," Lieutenant Monkberg says. He looks so pathetic that Shaftoe considers offering him some m-m-m-morphine, which induces a mild nausea of its own but holds back the greater nausea of seasickness. Then he comes to his senses, remembers that Lieutenant Monkberg is an officer whose duty it is to send him off to die, and decides that he can just go fuck himself sideways.
"Sir! What is the nature of our mission in Norway, sir?"
Monkberg unloads a rattling belch. "Ram and run," he says.
"Sir! Ram what, sir?"
"Norway."
"Sir! Run where, sir?"
"Sweden."
Shaftoe likes the sound of this. The perilous sea voyage through U boat-infested waters, the collision with Norway, the desperate run across frozen Nazi-occupied territory, all seem trivial compared with the shining goal of dipping into the world's largest and purest reservoir of authentic Swedish poontang.
"Shaftoe! Wake up!"
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
"You have noticed the way we are dressed." Monkberg refers to the fact that they have discarded their dog tags and are all wearing civilian or merchant-marine clothing.
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
"We don't want the Nuns, or anyone else, to know what we really are."
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
"Now, you might ask yourself, if we're supposed to look like civilians, then why the hell are we carrying tommy guns, grenades, demolition charges, et cetera."
"Sir! That was going to be my next question, sir!"
"Well, we have a cover story all worked out for that. Come with me."
Monkberg looks enthusiastic all of a sudden. He clambers to his feet and leads Shaftoe down various passageways and stairs to the freighter's cargo hold. "You know those other ships?"
Shaftoe looks blank.
"Those other ships around us? We are in the middle of a convoy, you know."
"Sir, yes sir!" Shaftoe says, a little less certainly. None of the men has been abovedecks very much in the hours since they were delivered, via submarine, to this wallowing wreck. Even if they had gone up for a look around they would have seen nothing but darkness and fog.
"A Murmansk convoy," Monkberg continues. "All of these ships are delivering weapons and supplies to the Soviet Union. See?"
They have reached a cargo hold. Monkberg turns on an overhead light, revealing–crates. Lots and lots and lots of crates.
"Full of weapons," Monkberg says, "including tommy guns, grenades, demolition charges, et cetera. Get my drift?"
"Sir, no sir! I do not get the lieutenant's drift!"
Monkberg comes one step closer to him. Unsettlingly close. He speaks, now, in a conspiratorial tone. "See, we're all just crew members on this merchant ship, making the run to Murmansk. It gets foggy. We get separated from our convoy. Then, boom! We slam into fucking Norway. We are stuck on Nazi-held territory. We have to make a break for Sweden! But wait a second, we say to ourselves. What about all those Germans between us and the Swedish border? Well, we had better be armed to the teeth, is what. And who is in a better position to arm themselves to the teeth than the crew of this merchant ship that is jam-packed with armaments? So we run down into the cargo hold and hastily pry open a few crates and arm ourselves."
Shaftoe looks at the crates. None of them have been pried open.
"Then," Monkberg continues, "we abandon ship and head for Sweden."
There is a long silence. Shaftoe finally rouses himself to say, "Sir! Yes, sir!"
"So get prying."
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
"And make it look hasty! Hasty! C'mon! Shake a leg!"
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
Shaftoe tries to get into the spirit of the thing. What's he going to use to pry a crate open? No crowbars in sight. He exits the cargo hold and strides down a passageway. Monkberg following him closely, hovering, urging him to be hastier: "You're in a hurry! The Nazis are coming! You have to arm yourself! Think of your wife and kids back in Glasgow or Lubbock or wherever the fuck you're from!"
"Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, sir!" Shaftoe says indignantly.
"No, no! Not in real life! In your pretend role as this stranded merchant son of a bitch! Look, Shaftoe! Look! Salvation is at hand!"
Shaftoe turns around to see Monkberg pointing at a cabinet marked
FIRE.
Shaftoe pulls the door open to find, among other implements, one of those giant axes that firemen are always carrying in and out of burning structures.
Thirty seconds later, he's down in the cargo hold, Paul Bunyaning a crate of .45-caliber ammunition. "Faster! More haphazard!" Monkberg shouts. "This isn't a precise operation, Shaftoe! You are in a blind panic!" Then he says, "Goddamn it!" and runs forward and seizes the ax from Shaftoe's hands.
Monkberg swings wildly, missing the crate entirely as he adjusts to the tremendous weight and length of the implement. Shaftoe hits the deck and rolls to safety. Monkberg finally gets his range and azimuth worked out, and actually makes contact with the crate. Splinters and chips skitter across the deck.
"See!" Monkberg says, looking over his shoulder at Shaftoe, "I want splinteriness! I want chaos!" He is swinging the ax at the same time as he's talking and looking at Shaftoe, and he's moving his feet too because the ship is rocking, and consequently the blade of the weapon misses the crate entirely, overshoots, and comes down right on Monkberg's ankle.
"Gadzooks!" Lieutenant Monkberg says, in a quiet, conversational tone. He is looking down at his ankle in fascination. Shaftoe comes over to see what's so interesting.
A good chunk of Monkberg's lower left leg has been neatly cross sectioned. In the beam of Shaftoe's flashlight, it is possible to see severed blood vessels and ligaments sticking out of opposite sides of the meaty wound, like sabotaged bridges and pipelines dangling from the sides of a gorge.
"Sir! You are wounded, sir!" Shaftoe says. "Let me summon Lieutenant Root!"
"No! You stay here and work!" Monkberg says. "I can find Root myself." He reaches down with both hands and squeezes his leg above the wound, causing blood to gush out onto the deck. "This is perfect!" he says meditatively. "This adds so much realism."
After several repetitions of this order, Shaftoe reluctantly goes back to crate-hacking. Monkberg hobbles and staggers around the hold for a few minutes, bleeding on everything, then drags himself off in search of Enoch Root. The last thing he says is, "Remember! We are aiming for a ransacked effect!"
But the bit with the leg wound gets the idea across to Shaftoe more than Monkberg's words ever could. The sight of the blood brings up memories of Guadalcanal and more recent adventures. His last dose of morphine is wearing off, which makes him sharper. And he's starting to get really seasick, which makes him want to fight it by doing some hard work.
So he more or less goes berserk with that ax. He loses track of what is going on.
He wishes that Detachment 2702 could have stayed on dry land–preferably dry warm land such as that place they stayed, for two sunny weeks, in Italy.
The first part of that mission had been hard work, what with humping those barrels of shit around. But the remainder of it (except for the last few hours) had been just like shore leave, except that there weren't any women. Every day they'd taken turns at the observation site, looking out over the Bay of Naples with their telescopes and binoculars. Every night, Corporal Benjamin sat down and radioed more gibberish in Morse code.
One night, Benjamin received a message and spent some time deciphering it. He announced the news to Shaftoe: "The Germans know we're here."
"What do you mean, they know we're here?"
"They know that for at least six months we have had an observation post overlooking the Bay of Naples," Benjamin said.
"We've been here less than two weeks."
"They're going to begin searching this area tomorrow."
"Well, then let's get the fuck out of here," Shaftoe said.
"Colonel Chattan orders you to wait," Benjamin said, "until you know that the Germans know that we are here."
"But I do know that the Germans know that we are here," Shaftoe said, "you just told me."
"No, no no no no," Benjamin said, "wait until you would know that the Germans knew even if you didn't know from being told by Colonel Chattan over the radio."
"Are you fucking with me?"
"Orders," Benjamin said, and handed Shaftoe the deciphered message as proof.
As soon as the sun came up they could hear the observation planes crisscrossing the sky. Shaftoe was ready to execute their escape plan, and he made sure that the men were too. He sent some of those SAS blokes down to reconnoiter the choke points along their exit route. Shaftoe himself just laid down on his back and stared up at the sky, watching those planes.
Did he know that the Germans knew now?
Ever since he'd woken up, a couple of SAS blokes had been following him around, staring at him. Shaftoe finally looked in their direction and nodded. They ran away. A moment later he heard wrenches crashing against the insides of toolboxes.
The Germans had observation planes all over the fucking sky. That was pretty strong circumstantial evidence that the Germans knew. And those planes were clearly visible to Shaftoe, so he could, arguably, know that they knew. But Colonel Chattan had ordered him to stay put "until positively sighted by Germans," whatever that meant.
One of those planes, in particular, was coming closer and closer. It was searching very close to the ground, cutting only a narrow swath on each pass. Waiting for it to pass over their position, Shaftoe wanted to scream. This was too stupid to be real. He wanted to send up a flare and get this over with.
Finally, in midafternoon, Shaftoe, lying on his back in the shade of a tree, looked straight up into the air and counted the rivets on the belly of that German airplane: a Henschel Hs 126* with a single swept-back wing mounted above the fuselage, so as not to block the view downwards, and with ladders and struts and giant awkward splay-footed landing gear sticking out all over. One German encased in a glass shroud and flying the plane, another out in the open, peering down through goggles and fiddling with a swivel-mounted machine gun. This one did all but look Shaftoe in the eye, then tapped the pilot on the shoulder and pointed down.
*Shaftoe had had nothing to do for the last couple of weeks except play Hearts using KNOW YOUR ENEMY cards, so he could now peg model numbers of obscure Kraut observation planes.
The Henschel altered its normal search pattern, cutting the pass short to swing round and fly over their position again.
"That's it," Shaftoe said to himself. He stood up and began walking towards the dilapidated barn. "That's it!" he shouted. "Execute!"
The SAS guys were in the back of the truck, under a tarp, working with their wrenches. Shaftoe glanced in their direction and saw gleaming parts from the Vickers laid out on clean white fabric. Where the hell had these guys gotten clean white fabric? They'd probably been saving it for today. Why couldn't they have got the Vickers in good working order before? Because they'd had orders to assemble it hastily, at the last possible minute.
Corporal Benjamin hesitated, one hand poised above his radio key. "Sarge, are you sure they know we're here?"
Everyone turned to see how Shaftoe would respond to this mild challenge. He had been slowly gathering a reputation as a man who needed watching.
Shaftoe turned on his heel and strolled out into the middle of a clearing a few yards away. Behind him, he could hear the other men of Detachment 2702 jockeying for position in the doorway, trying to get a clear view of him.
The Henschel was coming back for another pass, now so close to the ground that you could probably throw a rock through its windshield.
Shaftoe unslung his tommy gun, pulled back the bolt, cradled it, swung it up and around, and opened fire.
Now some might complain that the trench broom lacked penetrating power, but he was positive he could see pieces of crap flying out of the Henschel's motor. The Henschel went out of control almost immediately. It banked until its wings were vertical, veered, banked some more until it was upside down, shed what little altitude it had to begin with, and made an upside-down pancake landing in the olive trees no more than a hundred yards distant. It did not immediately burst into flame: something of a letdown there.
There was perfect silence from the other men. The only sound was the beepity-beep of Corporal Benjamin, his question now answered, sending out his little message. Shaftoe was able to follow the Morse code for once–this message was going out plaintext. "WE ARE DISCOVERED STOP EXECUTING PLAN TORUS."
As their first contribution to Plan Torus, the other men climbed onto the truck, which pulled out from its hidey-hole in the barn and idled in the trees nearby. When Benjamin was finished, he abandoned his radio and joined them.
As his first task of Plan Torus, Shaftoe walked around the premises in a neat crisscross pattern echoing that of the searching reconnaissance planes. He was carrying an upside-down gasoline can with no lid on it.
He left the can about one-third full, standing upright in the middle of the barn. He pulled the pin from a grenade, dropped it into the gasoline, and ran out of the building. The truck was already pulling away when he caught up with it and dove into the waiting arms of his unit, who pulled him on board. He got himself situated in the back of the truck just in time to see the building go up in a satisfying fireball.
"Okay," Shaftoe said to the men. "We got a few hours to kill."
All the men in the truck–except for the SAS blokes working on the Vickers–looked at each other like did he really just say that?
"Uh, Sarge," one of them finally said, "could you explain that part about killing some time?"
"The airplane's not going to be here for a while. Orders."
"Was there a problem or–"
"Nope. Everything's going fine. Orders.
Beyond that the men didn't want to gripe, but a lot more looks were exchanged across the bed of the truck. Finally, Enoch Root spoke up, "You men are probably wondering why we couldn't kill time for a few hours first, before alerting the Germans to our presence, and rendezvous with the plane just in the nick of time."
"Yeah!" said a whole bunch of guys and blokes, vigorously nodding.
"That's a good question," said Enoch Root. He said it like he already knew the answer, which made everyone in the truck want to slug him.
The Germans had deployed some ground units to secure the area's road intersections. When Detachment 2702 arrived at the first crossroads, all of the Germans were freshly dead, and all they had to do was to slow down momentarily so that some Marine Raiders could run out of hiding and jump on board.
The Germans at the second intersection had no idea what was going on. This was obviously the result of some kind of internal Wehrmacht communications fuckup, clearly recognizable as such even across cultural and linguistic boundaries. Detachment 2702 were able to simply open fire from underneath the tarp and tear them to pieces, or at least drive them into hiding.
The next Germans they ran into weren't having any of it; they had formed a roadblock out of a truck and two cars, and were lined up on the other side of it, pointing weapons at them. All of their weapons looked to be small arms. But by this time the Vickers had finally been put together, calibrated, fine-tuned, inspected, and loaded. The tarp came off Private Mikulski, a surly, brooding two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Polish-British SAS man, commenced operations with the Vickers at about the same time that the Germans did with their rifles.
Now when Bobby Shaftoe had gone through high school, he'd been slotted into a vocational track and ended up taking a lot of shop classes. A certain amount of his time was therefore, naturally, devoted to sawing large pieces of wood or metal into smaller pieces. Numerous saws were available in the shop for that purpose, some better than others. A sawing job that would be just ridiculously hard and lengthy using a hand saw would be accomplished with a power saw. Likewise, certain cuts and materials would cause the smaller power saws to overheat or seize up altogether and therefore called for larger power saws. But even with the biggest power saw in the shop, Bobby Shaftoe always got the sense that he was imposing some kind of stress on the machine. It would slow down when the blade contacted the material, it would vibrate, it would heat up, and if you pushed the material through too fast it would threaten to jam. But then one summer he worked in a mill where they had a bandsaw. The bandsaw, its supply of blades, its spare parts, maintenance supplies, special tools and manuals occupied a whole room. It was the only tool he had ever seen with infrastructure. It was the size of a car. The two wheels that drove the blade were giant eight-spoked things that looked to have been salvaged from steam locomotives. Its blades had to be manufactured from long rolls of blade-stuff by unreeling about half a mile of toothed ribbon, cutting it off, and carefully welding the cut ends together into a loop. When you hit the power switch, nothing would happen for a little while except that a subsonic vibration would slowly rise up out of the earth, as if a freight train were approaching from far away, and finally the blade would begin to move, building speed slowly but inexorably until the teeth disappeared and it became a bolt of pure hellish energy stretched taut between the table and the machinery above it. Anecdotes about accidents involving the bandsaw were told in hushed voices and not usually commingled with other industrial-accident anecdotes. Anyway, the most noteworthy thing about the bandsaw was that you could cut anything with it and not only did it do the job quickly and coolly but it didn't seem to notice that it was doing anything. It wasn't even aware that a human being was sliding a great big chunk of stuff through it. It never slowed down. Never heated up.
In Shaftoe's post-high-school experience he had found that guns had much in common with saws. Guns could fire bullets all right, but they kicked back and heated up, got dirty, and jammed eventually. They could fire bullets in other words, but it was a big deal for them, it placed a certain amount of stress on them, and they could not take that stress forever. But the Vickers in the back of this truck was to other guns as the bandsaw was to other saws. The Vickers was water-cooled. It actually had a fucking radiator on it. It had infrastructure, just like the bandsaw, and a whole crew of technicians to fuss over it. But once the damn thing was up and running, it could fire continuously for days as long as people kept scurrying up to it with more belts of ammunition. After Private Mikulski opened fire with the Vickers, some of the other Detachment 2702 men, eager to pitch in and do their bit, took potshots at those Germans with their rifles, but doing so made them feel so small and pathetic that they soon gave up and just took cover in the ditch and lit up cigarettes and watched the slow progress of the Vickers' bullet-stream across the roadblock. Mikulski hosed down all of the German vehicles for a while, yawing the Vickers back and forth like a man playing a fire extinguisher against the base of a fire. Then he picked out a few bits of the roadblock that he suspected people might be standing behind and concentrated on them for a while, boring tunnels through the wreckage of the vehicles until he could see what was on the other side, sawing through their frames and breaking them in half. He cut down half a dozen or so roadside trees behind which he suspected Germans were hiding, and then mowed about half an acre of grass.
By this time it had become evident that some Germans had retreated behind a gentle swell in the earth just off to one side of the road and were taking potshots from there, so Mikulski swung the muzzle of the Vickers up into the air at a steep angle and shot the bullet-stream into the sky so that the bullets plunged down like mortar shells on the other side of the rise. It took him a while to get the angle just right, but then he patiently distributed bullets over the entire field, like a man watering his lawn. One of the SAS blokes actually did some calculations on his knee, figuring out how long Mikulski should keep doing this to make sure that bullets were distributed over the ground in question at the right density–say, one per square foot. When the territory had been properly sown with lead slugs, Mikulski turned back to the roadblock and made sure that the truck pulled across the pavement was in small enough pieces that it could be shoved out of the way by hand.
Then he ceased firing at last. Shaftoe felt like he should make an entry in a log book, the way ships' captains do when they pull a man-of-war into port. When they drove past the wreckage, they slowed down for a bit to gawk. The brittle grey iron of the German vehicles' engine blocks had shattered like glass and you could look into the engines all neatly cross-sectioned and see the gleaming pistons and crankshafts exposed to the sun, bleeding oil and coolant.
They passed through what was left of the roadblock and drove onwards into a sparsely populated inland area that made excellent strafing territory for the Luftwaffe. The first two fighters that came around were torn apart in midair by Mikulski and his Vickers. The next pair managed to destroy the truck, the big gun, and Private Mikulski in one pass. No one else was hurt; they were all in the ditch, watching as Mikulski sat placidly behind the controls of his weapon, playing chicken with two Messerschmidts and eventually losing.
By now it was getting dark. The detachment began to make its way cross-country on foot, carrying Mikulski's remains on a stretcher. They ran into a German patrol and fought it out with them; two of the SAS men were wounded, and one of these had to be carried the rest of the way. Finally they reached their rendezvous point, a wheat field where they laid down road flares to outline a landing strip for a U.S. Army DC-3, which executed a deft landing, took them all on board, and flew them to Malta without further incident.
And that was where they were introduced to Lieutenant Monkberg for the first time.
RAM
"Sir! Would you mind telling me where we are going, sir!"
Lieutenant Monkberg heaves a deep, quivering sigh, his rib-cage shuddering like a tin shack in a cyclone. He executes a none too snappy pushup. His hands are planted on the rim, and so this action extricates his head from the bowl, of a toilet–or "head," as it is referred to in this context: an alarmingly rundown freighter. He jerks down a strip of abrasive Euro-bumwad and wipes his mouth before looking up at Sergeant Robert Shaftoe, who has braced himself in the hatchway.
And Shaftoe does need some serious bracing, because he is carrying close to his own weight in gear. All of it was issued to him thoughtfully prepacked.
He could have left it that way. But this is not how an Eagle Scout operates. Bobby Shaftoe has gone through and unpacked all of it, spread it out on the deck, examined it, and repacked it.
This allowed Shaftoe to do some serious inferring. To be specific, he infers that the men of Detachment 2702 are expected to spend most of the next three weeks trying as hard as they can not to freeze to death. This will be punctuated by trying to kill a lot of well-armed sons of bitches. German, most likely.
"N-N-N-Norway," Lieutenant Monkberg says. He looks so pathetic that Shaftoe considers offering him some m-m-m-morphine, which induces a mild nausea of its own but holds back the greater nausea of seasickness. Then he comes to his senses, remembers that Lieutenant Monkberg is an officer whose duty it is to send him off to die, and decides that he can just go fuck himself sideways.
"Sir! What is the nature of our mission in Norway, sir?"
Monkberg unloads a rattling belch. "Ram and run," he says.
"Sir! Ram what, sir?"
"Norway."
"Sir! Run where, sir?"
"Sweden."
Shaftoe likes the sound of this. The perilous sea voyage through U boat-infested waters, the collision with Norway, the desperate run across frozen Nazi-occupied territory, all seem trivial compared with the shining goal of dipping into the world's largest and purest reservoir of authentic Swedish poontang.
"Shaftoe! Wake up!"
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
"You have noticed the way we are dressed." Monkberg refers to the fact that they have discarded their dog tags and are all wearing civilian or merchant-marine clothing.
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
"We don't want the Nuns, or anyone else, to know what we really are."
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
"Now, you might ask yourself, if we're supposed to look like civilians, then why the hell are we carrying tommy guns, grenades, demolition charges, et cetera."
"Sir! That was going to be my next question, sir!"
"Well, we have a cover story all worked out for that. Come with me."
Monkberg looks enthusiastic all of a sudden. He clambers to his feet and leads Shaftoe down various passageways and stairs to the freighter's cargo hold. "You know those other ships?"
Shaftoe looks blank.
"Those other ships around us? We are in the middle of a convoy, you know."
"Sir, yes sir!" Shaftoe says, a little less certainly. None of the men has been abovedecks very much in the hours since they were delivered, via submarine, to this wallowing wreck. Even if they had gone up for a look around they would have seen nothing but darkness and fog.
"A Murmansk convoy," Monkberg continues. "All of these ships are delivering weapons and supplies to the Soviet Union. See?"
They have reached a cargo hold. Monkberg turns on an overhead light, revealing–crates. Lots and lots and lots of crates.
"Full of weapons," Monkberg says, "including tommy guns, grenades, demolition charges, et cetera. Get my drift?"
"Sir, no sir! I do not get the lieutenant's drift!"
Monkberg comes one step closer to him. Unsettlingly close. He speaks, now, in a conspiratorial tone. "See, we're all just crew members on this merchant ship, making the run to Murmansk. It gets foggy. We get separated from our convoy. Then, boom! We slam into fucking Norway. We are stuck on Nazi-held territory. We have to make a break for Sweden! But wait a second, we say to ourselves. What about all those Germans between us and the Swedish border? Well, we had better be armed to the teeth, is what. And who is in a better position to arm themselves to the teeth than the crew of this merchant ship that is jam-packed with armaments? So we run down into the cargo hold and hastily pry open a few crates and arm ourselves."
Shaftoe looks at the crates. None of them have been pried open.
"Then," Monkberg continues, "we abandon ship and head for Sweden."
There is a long silence. Shaftoe finally rouses himself to say, "Sir! Yes, sir!"
"So get prying."
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
"And make it look hasty! Hasty! C'mon! Shake a leg!"
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
Shaftoe tries to get into the spirit of the thing. What's he going to use to pry a crate open? No crowbars in sight. He exits the cargo hold and strides down a passageway. Monkberg following him closely, hovering, urging him to be hastier: "You're in a hurry! The Nazis are coming! You have to arm yourself! Think of your wife and kids back in Glasgow or Lubbock or wherever the fuck you're from!"
"Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, sir!" Shaftoe says indignantly.
"No, no! Not in real life! In your pretend role as this stranded merchant son of a bitch! Look, Shaftoe! Look! Salvation is at hand!"
Shaftoe turns around to see Monkberg pointing at a cabinet marked
FIRE.
Shaftoe pulls the door open to find, among other implements, one of those giant axes that firemen are always carrying in and out of burning structures.
Thirty seconds later, he's down in the cargo hold, Paul Bunyaning a crate of .45-caliber ammunition. "Faster! More haphazard!" Monkberg shouts. "This isn't a precise operation, Shaftoe! You are in a blind panic!" Then he says, "Goddamn it!" and runs forward and seizes the ax from Shaftoe's hands.
Monkberg swings wildly, missing the crate entirely as he adjusts to the tremendous weight and length of the implement. Shaftoe hits the deck and rolls to safety. Monkberg finally gets his range and azimuth worked out, and actually makes contact with the crate. Splinters and chips skitter across the deck.
"See!" Monkberg says, looking over his shoulder at Shaftoe, "I want splinteriness! I want chaos!" He is swinging the ax at the same time as he's talking and looking at Shaftoe, and he's moving his feet too because the ship is rocking, and consequently the blade of the weapon misses the crate entirely, overshoots, and comes down right on Monkberg's ankle.
"Gadzooks!" Lieutenant Monkberg says, in a quiet, conversational tone. He is looking down at his ankle in fascination. Shaftoe comes over to see what's so interesting.
A good chunk of Monkberg's lower left leg has been neatly cross sectioned. In the beam of Shaftoe's flashlight, it is possible to see severed blood vessels and ligaments sticking out of opposite sides of the meaty wound, like sabotaged bridges and pipelines dangling from the sides of a gorge.
"Sir! You are wounded, sir!" Shaftoe says. "Let me summon Lieutenant Root!"
"No! You stay here and work!" Monkberg says. "I can find Root myself." He reaches down with both hands and squeezes his leg above the wound, causing blood to gush out onto the deck. "This is perfect!" he says meditatively. "This adds so much realism."
After several repetitions of this order, Shaftoe reluctantly goes back to crate-hacking. Monkberg hobbles and staggers around the hold for a few minutes, bleeding on everything, then drags himself off in search of Enoch Root. The last thing he says is, "Remember! We are aiming for a ransacked effect!"
But the bit with the leg wound gets the idea across to Shaftoe more than Monkberg's words ever could. The sight of the blood brings up memories of Guadalcanal and more recent adventures. His last dose of morphine is wearing off, which makes him sharper. And he's starting to get really seasick, which makes him want to fight it by doing some hard work.
So he more or less goes berserk with that ax. He loses track of what is going on.
He wishes that Detachment 2702 could have stayed on dry land–preferably dry warm land such as that place they stayed, for two sunny weeks, in Italy.
The first part of that mission had been hard work, what with humping those barrels of shit around. But the remainder of it (except for the last few hours) had been just like shore leave, except that there weren't any women. Every day they'd taken turns at the observation site, looking out over the Bay of Naples with their telescopes and binoculars. Every night, Corporal Benjamin sat down and radioed more gibberish in Morse code.
One night, Benjamin received a message and spent some time deciphering it. He announced the news to Shaftoe: "The Germans know we're here."
"What do you mean, they know we're here?"
"They know that for at least six months we have had an observation post overlooking the Bay of Naples," Benjamin said.
"We've been here less than two weeks."
"They're going to begin searching this area tomorrow."
"Well, then let's get the fuck out of here," Shaftoe said.
"Colonel Chattan orders you to wait," Benjamin said, "until you know that the Germans know that we are here."
"But I do know that the Germans know that we are here," Shaftoe said, "you just told me."
"No, no no no no," Benjamin said, "wait until you would know that the Germans knew even if you didn't know from being told by Colonel Chattan over the radio."
"Are you fucking with me?"
"Orders," Benjamin said, and handed Shaftoe the deciphered message as proof.
As soon as the sun came up they could hear the observation planes crisscrossing the sky. Shaftoe was ready to execute their escape plan, and he made sure that the men were too. He sent some of those SAS blokes down to reconnoiter the choke points along their exit route. Shaftoe himself just laid down on his back and stared up at the sky, watching those planes.
Did he know that the Germans knew now?
Ever since he'd woken up, a couple of SAS blokes had been following him around, staring at him. Shaftoe finally looked in their direction and nodded. They ran away. A moment later he heard wrenches crashing against the insides of toolboxes.
The Germans had observation planes all over the fucking sky. That was pretty strong circumstantial evidence that the Germans knew. And those planes were clearly visible to Shaftoe, so he could, arguably, know that they knew. But Colonel Chattan had ordered him to stay put "until positively sighted by Germans," whatever that meant.
One of those planes, in particular, was coming closer and closer. It was searching very close to the ground, cutting only a narrow swath on each pass. Waiting for it to pass over their position, Shaftoe wanted to scream. This was too stupid to be real. He wanted to send up a flare and get this over with.
Finally, in midafternoon, Shaftoe, lying on his back in the shade of a tree, looked straight up into the air and counted the rivets on the belly of that German airplane: a Henschel Hs 126* with a single swept-back wing mounted above the fuselage, so as not to block the view downwards, and with ladders and struts and giant awkward splay-footed landing gear sticking out all over. One German encased in a glass shroud and flying the plane, another out in the open, peering down through goggles and fiddling with a swivel-mounted machine gun. This one did all but look Shaftoe in the eye, then tapped the pilot on the shoulder and pointed down.
*Shaftoe had had nothing to do for the last couple of weeks except play Hearts using KNOW YOUR ENEMY cards, so he could now peg model numbers of obscure Kraut observation planes.
The Henschel altered its normal search pattern, cutting the pass short to swing round and fly over their position again.
"That's it," Shaftoe said to himself. He stood up and began walking towards the dilapidated barn. "That's it!" he shouted. "Execute!"
The SAS guys were in the back of the truck, under a tarp, working with their wrenches. Shaftoe glanced in their direction and saw gleaming parts from the Vickers laid out on clean white fabric. Where the hell had these guys gotten clean white fabric? They'd probably been saving it for today. Why couldn't they have got the Vickers in good working order before? Because they'd had orders to assemble it hastily, at the last possible minute.
Corporal Benjamin hesitated, one hand poised above his radio key. "Sarge, are you sure they know we're here?"
Everyone turned to see how Shaftoe would respond to this mild challenge. He had been slowly gathering a reputation as a man who needed watching.
Shaftoe turned on his heel and strolled out into the middle of a clearing a few yards away. Behind him, he could hear the other men of Detachment 2702 jockeying for position in the doorway, trying to get a clear view of him.
The Henschel was coming back for another pass, now so close to the ground that you could probably throw a rock through its windshield.
Shaftoe unslung his tommy gun, pulled back the bolt, cradled it, swung it up and around, and opened fire.
Now some might complain that the trench broom lacked penetrating power, but he was positive he could see pieces of crap flying out of the Henschel's motor. The Henschel went out of control almost immediately. It banked until its wings were vertical, veered, banked some more until it was upside down, shed what little altitude it had to begin with, and made an upside-down pancake landing in the olive trees no more than a hundred yards distant. It did not immediately burst into flame: something of a letdown there.
There was perfect silence from the other men. The only sound was the beepity-beep of Corporal Benjamin, his question now answered, sending out his little message. Shaftoe was able to follow the Morse code for once–this message was going out plaintext. "WE ARE DISCOVERED STOP EXECUTING PLAN TORUS."
As their first contribution to Plan Torus, the other men climbed onto the truck, which pulled out from its hidey-hole in the barn and idled in the trees nearby. When Benjamin was finished, he abandoned his radio and joined them.
As his first task of Plan Torus, Shaftoe walked around the premises in a neat crisscross pattern echoing that of the searching reconnaissance planes. He was carrying an upside-down gasoline can with no lid on it.
He left the can about one-third full, standing upright in the middle of the barn. He pulled the pin from a grenade, dropped it into the gasoline, and ran out of the building. The truck was already pulling away when he caught up with it and dove into the waiting arms of his unit, who pulled him on board. He got himself situated in the back of the truck just in time to see the building go up in a satisfying fireball.
"Okay," Shaftoe said to the men. "We got a few hours to kill."
All the men in the truck–except for the SAS blokes working on the Vickers–looked at each other like did he really just say that?
"Uh, Sarge," one of them finally said, "could you explain that part about killing some time?"
"The airplane's not going to be here for a while. Orders."
"Was there a problem or–"
"Nope. Everything's going fine. Orders.
Beyond that the men didn't want to gripe, but a lot more looks were exchanged across the bed of the truck. Finally, Enoch Root spoke up, "You men are probably wondering why we couldn't kill time for a few hours first, before alerting the Germans to our presence, and rendezvous with the plane just in the nick of time."
"Yeah!" said a whole bunch of guys and blokes, vigorously nodding.
"That's a good question," said Enoch Root. He said it like he already knew the answer, which made everyone in the truck want to slug him.
The Germans had deployed some ground units to secure the area's road intersections. When Detachment 2702 arrived at the first crossroads, all of the Germans were freshly dead, and all they had to do was to slow down momentarily so that some Marine Raiders could run out of hiding and jump on board.
The Germans at the second intersection had no idea what was going on. This was obviously the result of some kind of internal Wehrmacht communications fuckup, clearly recognizable as such even across cultural and linguistic boundaries. Detachment 2702 were able to simply open fire from underneath the tarp and tear them to pieces, or at least drive them into hiding.
The next Germans they ran into weren't having any of it; they had formed a roadblock out of a truck and two cars, and were lined up on the other side of it, pointing weapons at them. All of their weapons looked to be small arms. But by this time the Vickers had finally been put together, calibrated, fine-tuned, inspected, and loaded. The tarp came off Private Mikulski, a surly, brooding two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Polish-British SAS man, commenced operations with the Vickers at about the same time that the Germans did with their rifles.
Now when Bobby Shaftoe had gone through high school, he'd been slotted into a vocational track and ended up taking a lot of shop classes. A certain amount of his time was therefore, naturally, devoted to sawing large pieces of wood or metal into smaller pieces. Numerous saws were available in the shop for that purpose, some better than others. A sawing job that would be just ridiculously hard and lengthy using a hand saw would be accomplished with a power saw. Likewise, certain cuts and materials would cause the smaller power saws to overheat or seize up altogether and therefore called for larger power saws. But even with the biggest power saw in the shop, Bobby Shaftoe always got the sense that he was imposing some kind of stress on the machine. It would slow down when the blade contacted the material, it would vibrate, it would heat up, and if you pushed the material through too fast it would threaten to jam. But then one summer he worked in a mill where they had a bandsaw. The bandsaw, its supply of blades, its spare parts, maintenance supplies, special tools and manuals occupied a whole room. It was the only tool he had ever seen with infrastructure. It was the size of a car. The two wheels that drove the blade were giant eight-spoked things that looked to have been salvaged from steam locomotives. Its blades had to be manufactured from long rolls of blade-stuff by unreeling about half a mile of toothed ribbon, cutting it off, and carefully welding the cut ends together into a loop. When you hit the power switch, nothing would happen for a little while except that a subsonic vibration would slowly rise up out of the earth, as if a freight train were approaching from far away, and finally the blade would begin to move, building speed slowly but inexorably until the teeth disappeared and it became a bolt of pure hellish energy stretched taut between the table and the machinery above it. Anecdotes about accidents involving the bandsaw were told in hushed voices and not usually commingled with other industrial-accident anecdotes. Anyway, the most noteworthy thing about the bandsaw was that you could cut anything with it and not only did it do the job quickly and coolly but it didn't seem to notice that it was doing anything. It wasn't even aware that a human being was sliding a great big chunk of stuff through it. It never slowed down. Never heated up.
In Shaftoe's post-high-school experience he had found that guns had much in common with saws. Guns could fire bullets all right, but they kicked back and heated up, got dirty, and jammed eventually. They could fire bullets in other words, but it was a big deal for them, it placed a certain amount of stress on them, and they could not take that stress forever. But the Vickers in the back of this truck was to other guns as the bandsaw was to other saws. The Vickers was water-cooled. It actually had a fucking radiator on it. It had infrastructure, just like the bandsaw, and a whole crew of technicians to fuss over it. But once the damn thing was up and running, it could fire continuously for days as long as people kept scurrying up to it with more belts of ammunition. After Private Mikulski opened fire with the Vickers, some of the other Detachment 2702 men, eager to pitch in and do their bit, took potshots at those Germans with their rifles, but doing so made them feel so small and pathetic that they soon gave up and just took cover in the ditch and lit up cigarettes and watched the slow progress of the Vickers' bullet-stream across the roadblock. Mikulski hosed down all of the German vehicles for a while, yawing the Vickers back and forth like a man playing a fire extinguisher against the base of a fire. Then he picked out a few bits of the roadblock that he suspected people might be standing behind and concentrated on them for a while, boring tunnels through the wreckage of the vehicles until he could see what was on the other side, sawing through their frames and breaking them in half. He cut down half a dozen or so roadside trees behind which he suspected Germans were hiding, and then mowed about half an acre of grass.
By this time it had become evident that some Germans had retreated behind a gentle swell in the earth just off to one side of the road and were taking potshots from there, so Mikulski swung the muzzle of the Vickers up into the air at a steep angle and shot the bullet-stream into the sky so that the bullets plunged down like mortar shells on the other side of the rise. It took him a while to get the angle just right, but then he patiently distributed bullets over the entire field, like a man watering his lawn. One of the SAS blokes actually did some calculations on his knee, figuring out how long Mikulski should keep doing this to make sure that bullets were distributed over the ground in question at the right density–say, one per square foot. When the territory had been properly sown with lead slugs, Mikulski turned back to the roadblock and made sure that the truck pulled across the pavement was in small enough pieces that it could be shoved out of the way by hand.
Then he ceased firing at last. Shaftoe felt like he should make an entry in a log book, the way ships' captains do when they pull a man-of-war into port. When they drove past the wreckage, they slowed down for a bit to gawk. The brittle grey iron of the German vehicles' engine blocks had shattered like glass and you could look into the engines all neatly cross-sectioned and see the gleaming pistons and crankshafts exposed to the sun, bleeding oil and coolant.
They passed through what was left of the roadblock and drove onwards into a sparsely populated inland area that made excellent strafing territory for the Luftwaffe. The first two fighters that came around were torn apart in midair by Mikulski and his Vickers. The next pair managed to destroy the truck, the big gun, and Private Mikulski in one pass. No one else was hurt; they were all in the ditch, watching as Mikulski sat placidly behind the controls of his weapon, playing chicken with two Messerschmidts and eventually losing.
By now it was getting dark. The detachment began to make its way cross-country on foot, carrying Mikulski's remains on a stretcher. They ran into a German patrol and fought it out with them; two of the SAS men were wounded, and one of these had to be carried the rest of the way. Finally they reached their rendezvous point, a wheat field where they laid down road flares to outline a landing strip for a U.S. Army DC-3, which executed a deft landing, took them all on board, and flew them to Malta without further incident.
And that was where they were introduced to Lieutenant Monkberg for the first time.
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It's kinda confusing to me.
Do you mean there is a reference to Cryptonomicon?
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
??? Why not? We're willing to use invisible ink but we're not willing to just not look at it?
Because it strikes me as utterly reckless.
- Location
- The Void
- Pronouns
- She/Her
How can it possibly be reckless? It's literally ninja magic that we use every day
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
I'm wary, but tentatively willing to accept the idea, given QM approval. Hazou's patterns are for seals right in front of him, so any activity will have to be physically periphery, preferably talking, and some people might find it rude for him to be drawing seals at the same time as whatever they're doing, in the same sense it'd come across as rude if he had his nose in a book.
Another big question is whether we can let other people know we can do this. If they don't know about the Iron Nerve and it's applications for Sealing, we're being pants-on-head stupid by drawing seals while distracted, and I don't know if we're keeping it a clan secret or not.
edit: it strikes me that the Iron Nerve should make Hazou ambidextrous by default, so could he use both hands to draw two seals at once? It would require some time to add 'left-handed Macerator' to his library of motions, but if he could crank out two Macerator blanks every five minutes, that's a lot of time saved.
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Ninja magic is not an argument.
I am mostly concerned about Hazō getting distracted while running through a motion, therefore stopping his brushstroke mid-work.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Those are fair objections, but he can at least do so while hanging with the team.
That would not be difficult to notice, and drawing seals is not dangerous.