Cryptonomicon
Neal Stephenson
Heinemann
910 pages

In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse - mathematical genius and young Commander in the U.S. Navy - is assigned to Detachment 2072. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people are called Churchill and Roosevelt. Detachment 2072's mission - 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. They have to play a dangerous game, a cryptographic chess match between Waterhouse and his German counterpart, translated into action by the gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces.
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. As governments and multinationals attack the endeavour, Randy joins forces with Shaftoe's though-as-nails granddaughter, Amy, to salvage a sunken Nazi submarine that holds the key to keeping the dream of a data haven afloat. But soon their scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy with its roots in Detachment 2072 and linked to an unbreakable Nazi code called Arethusa. And it will represent the path to unimaginable riches and a future of personal and digital liberty... or to the rebirth of totalitarism.