Schmidt, made rich by a chain of mall-like highway rest stops, has a scheme to fire payloads of molten sulfur into the stratosphere to reduce global temperatures. He volunteers to help the Dutch monarch and her entourage meet up with a Houston billionaire who has called a select group of foreign dignitaries together for a secret demonstration in the Chihuahuan Desert. Saskia’s plane maims the massive alpha hog that Rufus has been hunting, Ahab-style, for years, and while he gets to finish off the beast, he suddenly finds himself without a purpose. It is a work of great art, thought and creative daring the product of a truly iconoclastic imagination working with white-hot intensity.It’s the near future, about a decade from now, and the temperature in Texas routinely exceeds 113 degrees, requiring Rufus Grant, a person of complex racial background and an official member of the Comanche tribe, to wear an “earthsuit” if venturing out in the middle of the day. A breathtaking tour de force, and Neal Stephenson's most accomplished and affecting work to date, Cryptonomicon is profound and prophetic, hypnotic and hyper-driven, as it leaps forward and back between World War II and the World Wide Web, hinting all the while at a dark day-after-tomorrow. And it will represent the path to unimaginable riches and a future of personal and digital liberty.or to universal totalitarianism reborn.

But soon their scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy with its roots in Detachment 2702 linked to an unbreakable Nazi code called Arethusa. As governments and multinationals attack the endeavor, Randy joins forces with Shaftoe's tough-as-nails granddaughter, Amy, to secretly salvage a sunken Nazi submarine that holds the key to keeping the dream of a data haven afloat. Fast-forward to the present, where Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a 'data haven' in Southeast Asia-a place where encrypted data can be stored and exchanged free of repression and scrutiny.

It is a game, a cryptographic chess match between Waterhouse and his German counterpart, translated into action by the gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces. The mission of Waterhouse and Detachment 2702-commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe-is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse-mathematical genius and young Captain in the U.S. With this extraordinary first volume in an epoch-making masterpiece, Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century.

Stephenson neal cryptonomicon