"Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

whatever bank whose name is printed on the bills in their box--they sing to each other, and plant their
feet on the pavement in time to the music. The pole's pretty long, so they are that far apart, and they have
to sing loud to hear each other, and of course each pair of coolies in the street is singing their own
particular song, trying to drown out all of the others so that they don't get out of step.

So ten minutes before closing time on Friday afternoon, the doors of many banks burst open and
numerous pairs of coolies march in singing, like the curtain-raiser on a fucking Broadway musical, slam
their huge boxes of tattered currency down, and demand silver in exchange. All of the banks do this to
each other. Sometimes, they'll all do it on the same Friday, particularly at times like 28 November 1941,
when even a grunt like Bobby Shaftoe can understand that it's better to be holding silver than piles of old
cut-up newspaper. And that is why, once the normal pedestrians and food-cart operators and furious
Sikh cops have scurried out of the way, and plastered themselves up against the clubs and shops and
bordellos on Kiukiang Road, Bobby Shaftoe and the other Marines on the truck still cannot even see the
gunboat that is their destination, because of this horizontal forest of mighty bamboo poles. They cannot
even hear the honking of their own truck horn because of the wild throbbing pentatonic cacophony of
coolies singing. This ain't just your regular Friday P.M. Shanghai bank-district money-rush. This is an
ultimate settling of accounts before the whole Eastern Hemisphere catches fire. The millions of promises
printed on those slips of bumwad will all be kept or broken in the next ten minutes; actual pieces of
silver and gold will move, or they won't. It is some kind of fiduciary Judgment Day.

"Jesus Christ, I can't--" Private Wiley hollers.

"The captain said don't stop for any reason whatsofuckinever," Shaftoe reminds him. He's not telling
Wiley to run over the coolies, he's reminding Wiley that if he refrains from running over them, they will
have some explaining to do--which will be complicated by the fact that the captain's right behind them
in a car stuffed with Tommy Gun-toting China Marines. And from the way the captain's been acting
about this Station Alpha thing, it's pretty clear that he already has a few preliminary strap marks on his
ass, courtesy of some admiral in Pearl Harbor or even (drumroll) Marine Barracks, Eight and Eye Streets
Southeast, Washington, D.C.




Shaftoe and the other Marines have always known Station Alpha as a mysterious claque of pencil-
necked swabbies who hung out on the roof of a building in the International Settlement in a shack of
knot-pocked cargo pallet planks with antennas sticking out of it every which way. If you stood there
long enough you could see some of those antennas moving, zeroing in on something out to sea. Shaftoe
even wrote a haiku about it:



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 Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

Antenna searches
Retriever's nose in the wind
Ether's far secrets

This was only his second haiku ever--clearly not up to November 1941 standards--and he cringes to
remember it.