Description

With this extraordinary first volume in what promises to be an epoch-making masterpiece, Neal Stephenson hacks in to the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century.In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse - mathematical genius and young Captain in the U.S. Navy - is assigned to detachment 2702. It's an outfit so secret that merely a number of people know it exists, and several of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The objective of Watrehouse and Detatchment 2702-commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe-would be to keep consitently the Nazis ignorant of the truth that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code.