Cryptonomicon

So he picks up the boy and carries him through the compound, down semicollapsed hallways and over settling rubble-heaps and between dead Nipponese boys to that big staircase, and shows him the giant slabs of granite, tells how they were laid, one on top of the next, year by year, as the galleons full of silver came from Acapulco. Doug M. Shaftoe has been playing with blocks, so he zeroes in on the basic concept right away. Dad carries son up and down the stairway a few times. They stand at the bottom and look up at it. The block analogy has struck deep. Without any prompting, Doug M. raises both arms over his head and hollers "Soooo big" and the sound echoes up and down the stairs. Bobby wants to explain to the boy that this is how it's done,you pile one thing on top of the next and you keep it up and keep it up--sometimes the galleon sinks in a typhoon, you don't get your slab of granite that year--but you stick with it and eventually you end up with something sooo big.

He wishes that he could also make some further point about Glory and how she's been hard at work building her own staircase. Maybe if he was a word man like Enoch Root he would be able to explain. But he knows that this is going way over the toddler's head, just as it went over Bobby's head when Glory first showed him the steps. The only thing that'll stick with Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe is the memory that his father brought him here and carried him up and down the staircase, and if he lives long enough and thinks hard enough maybe he'll come to understand it too, the way Bobby does. That is a good enough start.

Word has gotten around, among the women in the courtyard, that Bobby Shaftoe has arrived--better late than never!--and so he does not have time for meaningful speeches anyway. The Altamiras send him out on an errand: to find Carlos, an eleven-year-old boy who was rounded up a few days ago when the Nips swept through Malate. Shaftoe finds MacArthur and Goto Dengo first, and excuses himself. Those two are deeply involved in a discussion of Goto Dengo's tunnel-building acumen, and how it might be put to use during the rebuilding of Nippon, a project that The General is eager to launch as soon as he finishes reducing the entire Pacific Rim to rubble.

"You have sins to atone for, Shaftoe," The General says, "and you can't atone for them by getting down on your knees and saying Hail Marys."

"I understand that, sir," Shaftoe says.

"I have a little job that needs doing--precisely the kind of thing for which a Marine Raider with parachute training would be ideally suited."

"What's the Department of the Navy going to think of that, sir?"

"I have no intention of letting the swabbies know I've found you until you have carried out this mission. But when you are finished--all is forgiven."

"I'll be right back," Shaftoe says.

"Where are you going, Shaftoe?"

"Got some other people who need to forgive me first."

He heads in the direction of Fort Santiago with a reconstituted, re-armed and beefed-up squad of Huks. The old Spanish fort has been liberated, within the last couple of hours, by the Americans. They have thrown open the doors to the dungeons and the subterranean caverns along the Pasig River. Finding eleven-year-old Carlos Altamira is, then, a problem of sorting through several thousand corpses. Almost all of the Filipinos who were herded into this place by the Nips died, either through out-and-out execution, or by suffocating in the dungeons, or by drowning when the tide came up the river and flooded the cells. Bobby Shaftoe doesn't really know what Carlos looked like, and so the best he can do is cull out the young-looking corpses and present them to members of the Altamira family for inspection. The benzedrine he took a couple of days ago has worn off, and he feels half dead himself. He trudges through the Spanish dungeon with a kerosene lantern, shining the dim yellow light on the faces of the dead, muttering the words to himself like a prayer.

"Do you reject the glamor of Evil, and refuse to be mastered by it?"

Chapter 86 WISDOM