Chapter 97 RETURN

"I SHALL RETURN" wrote Randy in his first e-mail message to Amy after he got to Tokyo. Returning to the Philippines is not a very good idea at all, and probably not the kind of thing that the old mellow Randy would have even considered. But here he is on a beach in the Sultanate of Kinakuta, down below Tom Howard's personal citadel, dipped in sunblock and Dramamined to the gills, getting ready to return. Reckoning that the goatee would make him easy to identify, he has shaved it off, and reckoning that hair is useless where he's headed (the jungle, jail, and Davy Jones's Locker being the three most likely possibilities), has run a buzzer over his head and shorn himself down to about an eighth of an inch all around. This in turn has necessitated finding a hat, to prevent radiation burns of the skull, and the only hat in Tom Howard's house that fits Randy is an outback number that some cephalomegalic Aussie contractor left behind there, evidently because its fragrance had begun to attract nocturnal rodents with a proclivity for aimless gnawing.

A pamboat is drawn up on the beach, and a couple of families' worth of badjao kids are tear-assing around, exactly like kids at a rest area on the interstate who know that in ten minutes they have to get back into the Winnebago. The boat's main hull is carved from a single rainforest tree, fifty feet long if it's an inch, narrow enough at its widest point that Randy could sit in the middle and touch both gunwales with out stretched hands. Most of the hull's shaded under a thatched roof of palm fronds, almost all grey-brown from age and salt-spray, though in one place an older woman is patching it with fresh greens and plastic twine. On each side a narrow bamboo outrigger is connected to the hull by bamboo poles. There's a sort of bridge that sticks way out over the bow, painted with bright red and green and yellow curlicues, like chains of vortices thrown off in the wake of a boat and reflecting the colors of a tropical sunset.

Speaking of which, the sun's going down right now, and they are making preparations to bring the final load, of gold up out of the hull of the pamboat. The land drops so precipitously towards the water that there's no road access to the beach, which is probably a good thing since they want this to be as private as possible. But Tom Howard had a lot of heavy stuff shipped in here when he was constructing his house, and so he already has a short section of narrow-gauge railway in place. This sounds more impressive than it is: a pair of steel I-beams, already rusting, bracketed to half-buried concrete ties, running fifty yards straight up a forty-five-degree slope to a small plateau that's accessible via private road. There he's got a diesel-powered winch that he can use to drag stuff up the rails. It is more than adequate for this evening's job, which is to move a couple of hundred kilograms of bullion-the last of the gold from the sunken submarine-up from the beach and into the vault in his house. Tomorrow, he and the others can truck it into downtown Kinakuta at their leisure, and turn it into strings of bits representing very large numbers with noteworthy cryptological properties.

The badjaos share the same maddening refusal to be exotic that Randy has found everywhere on his travels: the guy who's running the show insists that his name is Leon, and the kids on the beach are forever copping stereotyped martial-arts poses and hollering "hi-yaaa!" which Randy knows is a Power Rangers thing, because Avi's kids did exactly the same thing until their father banned all Power Ranger emulation inside the house. When the first milk crate full of gold bars is dropped off the high bridge of the pamboat by Leon, and half-buries itself in the floury damp sand below, Avi stands over it and tries to utter some kind of solemn prayer for the dead in Hebrew, and gets maybe half a dozen phonemes into it before two of the badjao kids, having pegged him as a permanent stationary object, decide to use him as tactical cover, and take up positions on either side of him madly hi-yaaaing each other. Avi's not so full of himself that he can't see the humor in this, and yet not so sentimental that he doesn't obviously want to strangle them.

John Wayne is patrolling the surf with a cigarette and a pump shotgun. Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe rates the probability of frogman attack rather low because the gold in the pamboat is only worth two and half million dollars, an amount that hardly rates anything as elaborate, and expensive, as a seaborne assault. John Wayne needs to be there in case someone gets the mistaken impression that they've somehow managed to pack ten or twenty times that much gold into the pamboat. This seems improbable from a hydrodynamics standpoint. But Doug says that overestimating the intelligence of the enemy is, if anything, more dangerous than underestimating it. He, Tom Howard, and Jackie Woo are up the hill guarding the roadhead with assault rifles. Tom's been positively strutting. All of his fantasies are coming true in this little tableau.

A large plastic box thuds into the sand, breaks open, and spills out a mess of shattered coral. Randy strolls over to it and sees leaves of gold inside the coral carapace, tiny holes punched into them. To him the holes are more interesting than the gold.

But everyone's reacting differently. Doug Shaftoe's always conspicuously cool and sort of pensive in the presence of a very large amount of gold, like he's always known that it was there, but touching it makes him think about where it came from and what was done to get it there. The sight of a single brick almost made Goto Dengo vomit up his Kobe beef. For Eberhard F

After the gold has been unloaded, and Leon has taken on some supplies, Tom Howard produces a bottle of single-malt scotch, finally answering Randy's question of who patronizes all of those duty-free stores in airports. Everyone gathers on the beach for a toast. Randy's a little edgy when he joins this circle, because he's not sure what he's going to propose a toast toif the responsibility falls to him. Unearthing Golgotha? He can't really drink to that. The meeting of minds between Avi and Goto Dengo was a spark jumping across an air gap-sudden, dazzling, and a little scary-and it hinged around their common understanding that all of this gold is blood money, that Golgotha is a grave they're preparing to desecrate. So that's not exactly toast material. How about a toast to abstract lofty principles, then?

Here Randy's got another hangup, something that's been slowly dawning on him as he stands on the beach beneath Tom Howard's concrete house: the perfect freedom that Tom's found in Kinakuta is a cut flower in a crystal vase. It's lovely, but it's dead, and the reason it's dead is that it has been alienated from its germinal soil. And what is that soil exactly? To a first approximation you could just say "America," but it's a little more complicated than that; America's just the hardest-to-ignore instantiation of a cultural and philosophical system that can be seen in a few other places. Not many. Certainly not in Kinakuta. The closest outpost is really not that far away: the Filipinos, for all of their shortcomings in the human rights department, have imbibed the whole Western freedom thing deeply, in a way that has arguably made them economic laggards compared to Asian countries where no one gives a shit about human rights.

In the end it's a moot point; Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe purposes a toast to smooth sailing. Two years ago Randy would have found this to be banal and simple-minded. Now he understands it as Doug's implicit nod to the world's moral ambiguity, and a pretty deft preemptive strike against any more inflated rhetoric. Randy downs his Scotch in a gulp and then says, "let's do it," which is also pretty stunningly banal, but this gathering-in-a-circle-on-the-beach thing really makes him nervous; he signed on to participate in a business opportunity, not to join a cabal.

Four days on the pamboat ensue. It putts along at a steady ten kilometers per hour day and night, and it sticks to shallow coastal waters along the periphery of the Sulu Sea. They are lucky with the weather. They stop twice on Palawan and once on Mindoro to take on diesel fuel and to barter for unspecified commodities. Cargo goes down in the hull, people go above it on the deck, which is just a few loose planks thrown crosswise over the gunwales. Randy feels more out-and-out lonely than he has since he was a teenaged geek, but he's not sad about it. He sleeps a lot, perspires, drinks water, reads a couple of books, and dicks around with his new GPS receiver. Its most salient feature is a mushroom-shaped external antenna that can pick up weak signals, which ought to be useful in triple-canopy jungle. Randy has punched Golgotha's latitude and longitude into its memory, so that by hitting a couple of buttons he can instantly see how far away it is, along what heading. From Tom Howard's beach it's almost exactly a thousand kilometers. When the pamboat finally noses up on a tidal mudflat in southern Luzon, and Randy sloshes ashore in full MacArthurian style, the distance is only about forty clicks.

But tumbledown volcanoes rise before him, black and mist-shrouded, and he knows from experience that forty kilometers in boondocks will be much rougher going than the first nine hundred and sixty.

The bell tower of an old Spanish church rises up above the coconut palms not far away, carved from blocks of volcanic tuff that are beginning to glow in the lambency of another damn mind-blowing tropical sunset. After he's snagged some extra bottles of water and said his good-byes to Leon and the family, Randy walks towards it. As he goes, he erases the memory of Golgotha's location from his GPS, just in case it gets confiscated or ripped off.

The next thought he has says something about his general frame of mind: that nuts are the genitalia of trees is never more obvious than when you are looking at a cluster of swelling young coconuts nestled in the hairy dark groin of a palm tree. It's surprising that the Spanish missionaries didn't have the whole species eradicated. Anyway, by the time he's reached the church, he's picked up a retinue of little bare-chested Filipino kids who apparently aren't used to seeing white men materialize out of nowhere. Randy's not crazy about this, but he'll settle for no one summoning the police.

A Nipponese sport-utility vehicle of the adorably styled, alarmingly high-center-of-gravity school is parked in front of the church, ringed by impressed villagers. Randy wonders if they could have done this any more conspicuously. A fiftyish driver leans against the front bumper smoking a cigarette and shooting the breeze with some local dignitaries: a priest and, for god's sake, a cop with a fucking bolt-action rifle. Just about everyone in sight is smoking Marlboros, which have apparently been distributed as a goodwill gesture. Randy's got to get himself back into a Philippine frame of mind: the way to sneak into the country is not to mount some cloak-and-dagger operation, crawling up onto an isolated beach in a matte black wetsuit in the middle of the night, but simply to waltz in and make friends with all of the people who see you. Because it's not like they're stupid; they are going to see you.

Randy smokes a cigarette. He had never done this in his life until a few months ago, when he finally got it through his head that it was a social thing, that some people take it as an insult when you turn down an offered cigarette, and that a few smokes weren't going to kill him in any case. None of these people, except for the driver and the priest, speaks a word of English, and so this is the only way he can communicate with them. Anyway, given all the other changes he's gone through, why the hell shouldn't he become a cigarette smoker while he's at it? Maybe next week he'll be shooting heroin. For something disgusting and lethal, cigarettes are amazingly enjoyable.

The driver is named Matthew, and he really turns out to be not so much a driver as a charismatic fixer/negotiator, a smoother of the way, a human road grader. Randy just stands there passively while Matthew charmingly and hilariously extricates them from this impromptu village meeting, a job that would probably be next to impossible if the priest were not so clearly complicit. The cop looks to the priest for cues as to what he should do, and the priest tells him something complicated with a series of looks and gestures, and in that way, somehow, Randy finds his way into the sport-utility vehicle's passenger seat and Matthew gets behind the wheel. Well after sunset they trundle out of the village along its execrable one-lane road, trailed by kids who run alongside keeping one hand on the car, like Secret Service agents in a motorcade. They are able to do this for quite a while because they've gone a few kilometers before the road gets good enough for Matthew to shift out of first gear.

This is not a part of the world where it makes any sense at all to drive at night, but clearly Matthew wasn't interested in an overnight stay at that village. Randy has a pretty good idea of what's going to happen now: many hours of driving very slowly on circuitous roads, half-blocked by piles of freshly harvested young coconuts, impeded by hunks of lumber thrown across the right-of-way as speed bumps to prevent kids and dogs from being run over. He leans his seat back.

Bright light is streaming into the car and he thinks: roadblock, cops, spotlights. The light's blocked by a silhouette. There's a rapping noise on the window. Randy looks over and sees the driver's seat empty, no keys in the ignition. The car's cool and dormant. He sits up and rubs his face, partly because it needs to be rubbed and partly because it's probably smart to keep one's hands in plain sight. More rapping on the windshield, growingly impatient. The windows are fogged and he can only see shapes. The light's reddish. He's got a completely inappropriate erection. Randy gropes for a window control, but the car's got power windows and they don't work when it's not running. He gropes around on the door until he's figured out how to unlock it, and almost instantly it flies open and someone's coming inside to join him.

She ends up on Randy's lap, lying sideways on top of him, her head on his chest. "Close the door," Amy says, and Randy does. Then she squirms around until she's face to face with him, her pelvic center of gravity grinding mercilessly against the huge generalized region between navel and thigh that has, in recent months, become one big sex organ for him. She brackets his neck between her forearms and grabs the carotid supports of the whiplash arrestor. He's busted. The obvious thing now would be a kiss, and she feints in that direction, but then reconsiders, as it seems like some serious looking is in order at this time. So they look at each other for probably a good minute. It's not a moony kind of look that they share, not a starry-eyed thing by any means, more like a what the fuck have we gotten ourselves intothing. As if it's really important to both of them that they mutually appreciate how serious everything is. Emotionally, yes, but also from a legal and, for lack of a better term, military standpoint. But once Amy is satisfied that her boy does indeed get it, on all of these fronts, she permits herself a vaguely incredulous-looking sneer that blossoms into a real grin, and then a chuckle that in a less heavily armed woman might be characterized as a giggle, and then, just to shut herself up, she pulls hard on the stainless steel goalposts of the whiplash arrestor and nuzzles her face up to Randy's and, after ten heartbeats' worth of exploratory sniffling and nuzzling, kisses him. It's a chaste kiss that takes a long time to open up, which is totally consistent with Amy's cautious, sardonic approach to everything, as well as with the hypothesis, alluded to once while they were driving to Whitman, that she is in fact a virgin.

Randy's life is essentially complete at the moment. He has come to understand during all of this that the light shining in through the windows is in fact the light of dawn, and he tries to fight back the thought that it's a good day to diebecause it's clear to him that although he might go on from this point to make a lot of money, become famous, or whatever, nothing's ever going to top this. Amy knows it too, and she makes the kiss last for a very long time before finally breaking away with a little gasp for air, and bowing her head so that her brow is supported on Randy's breastbone, the curve of her head following that of his throat, like the coastlines of South America and Africa. Randy almost can't take the pressure of her on his groin. He braces his feet against the floorboards of the sport-utility vehicle and squirms.

She moves suddenly and decisively, grabbing the hem of the left leg of his baggy shorts and yanking it almost up to his navel, taking his boxer shorts along with. Randy pops free and takes aim at her, straining upwards, bobbing slightly with each beat of his heart, glowing healthily (he thinks modestly) in the dawn light. Amy's in a sort of light wrap around skirt, which she suddenly flings over him, producing a momentary tent-pole effect. But she's on the move, reaching up beneath to pull her underwear out of the way, and then before he can even believe it's happening she sits down on him, hard, producing a nearly electrical shock. Then she stops moving-daring him.

Randy's toe knuckles pop audibly. He lifts himself and Amy into the air, experiences some kind of synaesthetic hallucination very much like the famous "jump into hyperspace" scene from Star Wars.Or perhaps the air bag has accidentally detonated? Then he pumps something like an Imperial pint of semen-it's a seemingly open-ended series of ejaculations, each coupled to the next by nothing more than a leap of faith that another one is coming-and in the end, like all schemes built on faith and hope, it lapses, and then Randy sits utterly still until his body realizes it has not drawn breath in quite a while. He fills his lungs all the way, stretching them out, which feels almost as good as the orgasm, and then he opens his eyes-she's staring down at him in bemusement, but (thank god!) not horror or disgust. He settles back into the bucket seat, which squeezes his butt in a not-unpleasant gesture of light harassment. Between that, and Amy's thighs, and other penetrations, he is not going anywhere for a while, and he's moderately afraid of what Amy's going to say-she has a lengthy menu of possible responses to all of this, most of them at Randy's expense. She plants a knee, levers herself up, grabs the tail of his Hawaiian shirt and cleans herself off a bit. Then she shoves the door open, pats him twice on his whiskery cheek, says "Shave," and exits stage left. Randy can now see that the air bag has not, in fact, deployed. And yet he has the same feeling of a major sudden life change that one might get after surviving a car crash.

He is a mess. Fortunately his bag's in the backseat, with another shirt. A few minutes later he finally emerges from the fogged-up car and gets a look at his surroundings. He's in a community built on a canted plateau with a few widely spaced, very high coconut palms scattered about. Downslope, which appears to be roughly south, there is a pattern of vegetation that Randy recognizes as a tri-leveled cash-crop thing: pineapples down on the ground, cacao and coffee at about head level, coconuts and bananas above that. The yellowish green leaves of the banana trees are especially appealing, seemingly big enough to stretch out and sunbathe on. To the north, and uphill, a jungle is attempting to tear down a mountain.

This compound that he's in is obviously a recent thing, laid out by actual surveyors, designed by people with educations, subsidized by someone who can afford brand-new sheets of corrugated tin, ABS drainpipe, and proper electrical wiring. It has something in common with a normal Philippine town in that it's built around a church. In this case the church is small-Enoch called it a chapel-but that it was designed by Finnish architecture students would be obvious to Randy even if Root hadn't divulged it. It has a bit of that Bucky Fuller tensegrity thing going for it-lots of exposed, tensioned cables radiating from the ends of tubular struts, all collaborating to support a roof that's not a single surface but a system of curved shards. It looks awfully well designed to Randy, who now judges buildings on the sole criterion of their ability to resist earthquakes. Root told him it was built by the brothers of a missionary order, and by local volunteers, with materials contributed by a Nipponese foundation that is still trying to make amends for the war.

Music is coming out of the church. Randy checks his watch and discovers that it's Sunday morning. He avoids participating in the Mass, on the excuse that it's already underway and he doesn't want to interrupt it, and ambles toward a nearby pavilion-a corrugated roof sheltering a concrete floor slab with some plastic tables-where breakfast is being laid out. He arouses violent controversy among a loose flock of chickens that is straggling across his path, none of whom can seem to figure out how to get out of his way; they're scared of him, but not mentally organized enough to translate that fear into a coherent plan of action. Several miles away, a helicopter is flying in from the sea, shedding altitude as it homes in on a pad somewhere up in the jungle. It is a big and gratuitously loud cargo-carrying chopper with unfamiliar lines, and Randy vaguely suspects that it was built in Russia for Chinese customers and that it is part of Wing's operations.

He recognizes Jackie Woo lounging at one of the tables, drinking tea and reading a bright magazine. Amy's in the adjacent kitchen, embroiled in Tagalog girl-talk with a couple of middle-aged ladies who are handling the preparations for the meal. This place seems pretty safe, and so Randy stops in the open, punches in the digits that only he and Goto Dengo know, and takes a GPS reading. According to the machine, they are no more than 4500 meters away from the main drift of Golgotha. Randy checks the heading and determines that it is uphill from here. Although the jungle blurs the underlying shape of the earth, he thinks that it's going to be up in the valley of a nearby river.

Forty-five hundred meters seems impossibly close, and he's still standing there trying to convince himself that his memory is sound when the ragged voices of the worshippers suddenly spill out across the compound as the chapel's door is pushed open. Enoch Root emerges, wearing (inevitably) what Randy would describe as a wizard's robe. But as he walks across the compound he shucks it off to reveal sensible khakis underneath, and hands the robe to a young Filipino acolyte who scurries back inside with it. The singing trails off and then Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe emerges from the church, followed by John Wayne and several people who appear to be locals. Everyone drifts towards the pavilion. The alertness that comes with being in a new place, combined with the neurological aftermath of that shockingly big and long orgasm, has left Randy's senses sharper, and his mind clearer, than they've ever been, and he's impatient to get going. But he can't dispute the wisdom of getting a good breakfast, so he shakes hands all around and sits down with the others. There is a bit of small talk about how his pamboat voyage went.

"Your friends should have come into the country that way," says Doug Shaftoe, and then goes on to explain that Avi and both of the Gotos were supposed to be here yesterday, but they were detained at the airport for some hours and eventually had to fly back to Tokyo while some mysterious immigration hassles were ironed out. "Why didn't they go to Taipei or Hong Kong?" Randy wonders aloud since both those cities are much closer to Manila. Doug stares at him blankly and observes that both of those are Chinese cities, and reminds him that their presumed adversary now is General Wing, who has a lot of pull in places like that.

Several backpacks have already been prepared, laden mostly with bottled water. After everyone's had a chance to digest breakfast, Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe, Jackie Woo, John Wayne, Enoch Root, America Shaftoe, and Randall Lawrence Waterhouse all don packs. They begin to stroll uphill, passing out of the compound and into a transitional zone of big-leaved traveler trees and giant clusters of bamboo: ten-centimeter-thick trunks spraying out and up from central roots, like frozen shell-bursts, to heights of at least ten meters, the poles striped green and brown where the husky leaves are peeling away. The canopy of the jungle looms higher and higher, accentuated by the fact that it's uphill from here, and emits a fantastic whistling noise, like a phaser on overload. As they enter the shade of the canopy the racket of crickets is added to that whistling noise. It sounds as though there must be millions of crickets and millions of whatever's making the whistling noise, but from time to time the sound will suddenly stop and then start up again, so if there are a lot of them, they are all following the same score.

The place is filled with plants that in America are only seen in pots, but that grow to the size of oak trees here, so big that Randy's mind can't recognize them as, for example, the same kind of Diefenbachia that Grandmother Waterhouse used to have growing on the counter in her downstairs bathroom. There is an incredible variety of butterflies, for whom the wind-free environment seems to be congenial, and they weave in and out among huge spiderwebs that call to mind the design of Enoch Root's chapel. But it is clear that the place is ultimately ruled by ants; in fact it makes the most sense to think of the jungle as a living tissue of ants with minor infestations of trees, birds, and humans. Some of them are so small that they are, to other ants, as those ants are to people; they prosecute their ant activities in the same physical space but without interfering, like many signals on different frequencies sharing the same medium. But there are a fair number of ants carrying other ants, and Randy assumed that they are not doing it for altruistic reasons.

Where the jungle's dense it is impassable, but there are a fair number of places where the trees are spaced a few meters apart and the under-growth is only knee-high, and light shines through. By moving from one such place to another they make slow progress in the general direction indicated by Randy's GPS. Jackie Woo and John Nguyen have disappeared, and appear to be moving parallel to them but much more quietly. The jungle is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live, or even stop moving, there. Just as the beggars in Intramuros see you as a bipedal automatic teller machine, the insects here see you as a big slab of animated but not very well defended food. The ability to move, far from being a deterrent, serves as an unforgeable guarantee of freshness. The canopy's tentpoles are huge trees-"Octomelis sumatrana," says Enoch Root-with narrow buttress roots splayed out explosively in every direction, as thin and sharp as machetes sunk into the earth. Some of them are almost completely obscured by colossal philodendrons winding up their trunks.

They crest a broad, gentle ridgeline; Randy had forgotten that they were moving uphill. The air suddenly becomes cooler and moisture condenses on their skins. When the whistlers and the crickets pause, it be comes possible to hear the murmur of a stream down below them. The next hour is devoted to slowly working their way down the slope towards it. They cover a total of a hundred meters; at this rate, Randy thinks, it should take them two days, hiking around the clock, to reach Golgotha. But he keeps this observation to himself. As they move downhill he starts to become aware of, and to be taken aback by, the sheer amount of biomass that happens to be above them-forty or fifty meters above them in many cases. He feels as though he's at the bottom of the food chain.

They enter a sunnier zone that consequently is snarled by much heavier undergrowth, and are forced to break out the machetes and hack their way through to the river. Enoch Root explains that this is a place where a small lahar, which had been funneled between the steep walls of the river's gorge farther upstream, spread out and mowed down a few hectares of ancient trees, clearing the path for smaller, opportunistic vegetation. This is fascinating for about ten seconds and then it's back to the machete work. Eventually they reach the edge of the river, all of them sticky and greenish and itching from the sap and juice and pulp of the vegetation they have assaulted in order to get here. The river's bed is shallow and rocky here, with no discernible bank. They sit down and drink water for a while. "What is the point of all this?" asks Enoch Root suddenly. "I don't mean to sound discouraged by these physical barriers, because I'm not. But I'm wondering whether you have worked out the goal of it in your own mind."

"This is fact-finding. Nothing more," Randy says.

"But there's no point in just aimlessly finding facts unless you're a pure scientist, or a historian. You are representing a business concern here. Correct?"

"Yes."

"And so if I were a shareholder in your company I could demand an explanation of why you are sitting here on the edge of this river right now instead of actually doing whatever it is that your company does."

"Assuming you were an intelligent shareholder, yes, that's what you'd be doing."

"And what would your explanation be, Randy?"