It’s looking much more like this is going to be a 2-month book club considering that I’ve gotten halfway through the book at the end of the month. Anyway, a lot of stuff has happened in the book and I still want to finish it. The chapter-by-chapter summary I found online and mentioned previously peters out about halfway through our reading, so here’s very brief sentence-long summaries of the chapters.
- Lizard: Bobby Shaftoe in Italy while they sit around and make it look like they’ve been there a while and transmit encoded data.
- The Castle: Lawrence Waterhouse is in Qwghlm and he’s paranoid that everyone is a spy. Also a complete explanation of the creation and use of a one-time pad.
- Why: Randy Waterhouse is in the Sultanate of Kinakuta decompressing from his flight and preparing for the big meeting by reading the business plan, answering his email (including an interesting one from someone with a root email) and reading up on an old rival who is now into hive minds.
- Retrograde Maneuver: Japanese soldiers escaping do not sufficiently destroy some code manuals.
- Huffduff: Lawrence, still in Qwghlm, engages in subterfuge to make the residents think he’s doing high frequency direction finding while he does other code and information flow works. He advises Bletchley Park to crash a boat with code manuals into Germany as an excuse to abandon codes known to be broken. Lawrence also engages in intercourse with a friendly potential spy.
- Pages: The Australians find the badly-buried Japanese code manuals mentioned in Retrograde Maneuver.
- Ram: Bobby is on a boat full of guns. He flashes back to the Italy escape and the very deadly Vickers machine gun, and then witnesses an argument over whether to follow orders and leave a code manual in the boat after it crashes.
- Diligence: Randy doesn’t tell The Dentist everything that he’s up to in the Philippines.
- Spearhead: Lawrence and Bobby investigate the U-553 which just happens to have crashed, with no crew, very near Qwghlm. There’s useful code info on board, but a safe is stuck.
- Morphium: Bobby uses controlled explosives to release the safe. He also gets his hands on some German morphine.
- Suit: Randy emails with root, and has a chat with The Dentist.
- Cracker: Lawrence cracks the safe from U-553 and finds a Chinese gold bar and some hand-written encoded sheets.
- Sultan: Epiphyte(2) has a meeting with the Sultanate and some potential investors in The Crypt.
- Skipping: Goto Dengo ends up in the water after a surprise American attack.
- Mugs: Randy is still in the meeting, realizing that maybe all of these guys are not such good guys. He sets up his laptop for a demo and writes a script that will take pictures of the people who use it.
- Yamamoto: Admiral Yamamoto is killed while in flight. Dying, it occurs to him that the Japanese codes are probably compromised.
- Antaeus: Lawrence talks to Alan Turing. They discuss the Turing machines and binary encoding. It’s revealed that the mysterious handwritten encoded pages on U-553 were in Rudy von Hacklheber’s handwriting.
- Phreaking: Randy reads more about his old rival and his attempts to create a (pre-twitter) hivemind, then watches as some of his pals do some Van Eck phreaking (with explanation) which reveals a long “Letters to Penthouse”-style story about the fetishization of archaic things.
- Afloat: Dengo is still in the water. He makes it to shore with one other guy, then finds some cannibals.
- Shinola: Bobby is unnerved by Lawrence but not surprised that he gets along with Root. Now he’s on a mission pretending to be Afro-Caribbean traders and they meet U-691.
- Hostilities: Randy emails root again, and Epiphyte(2) comes to terms with the idea that they’re going to be helping bad guys.
- Funkspiel: Lawrence witnesses and takes part in a radio operation to make Germany think that U-691 has been taken by the Allies.
- Heap: Randy emails root agin, then Avi reveals that he’s building the Crypt to store a Holocaust-prevention resource. Randy reveals to Avi that the Shaftoes have found sunken treasure.
- Seeky: Bobby and Root get interrogated by the Germans on U-691. They shoot Bobby up with morphine and he tells them everything but they don’t really believe him since it doesn’t make sense. The Captain of the ship, who is the only one who believes that the enigma has been broken, takes back over and decides to go straight to Germany as directly as possible.
- Wreck: Randy is back on the water with America and Douglas Shaftoe and they use a sonar ROV to take a look at a sunken u-boat.
- Santa Monica: Lawrence is on his way to Australia. He stops over in the US and, on Santa Monica pier, considers the trans-oceanic data cables.
Whew. See you in…a week 😉
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