Cryptonomicon hook...

Starting a new read and I am excited: Corporal Robert "Bobby" Shaftoe is the first character I have met in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (1999). I have just begun this book, only having turned a few pages—The Prologue—while eating Sunday morning fried eggs seasoned with Tajin and dill-weed. I'm hooked already! Shaftoe seemingly loves to write haiku, and while careening along the streets of Shanghai in a truck speeding by money-crate carrying laborers, is composing them in his head...

"Coolies" (offensive): Corp. Shaftoe's truck is on two wheels as a hard turn is taken to avoid pedestrians on a 45 mph race to the waterfront to deliver filing cabinets filled with code books. Money carriers are delivering boxes of paper money to banks all over the financial district to exchange for commodity currency. These boxes are carried by two handlers each via a long bamboo pole, each end held on a shoulder. They sing to each other to help keep step, each pair competing in volume with other carriers on the street...

Two tires fly. Two wail.
A bamboo grove, all chopped down
From it, warring songs.

Spy Stations: The race originates from Station Alpha, which Shaftoe describes 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 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."

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

A gunboat in the harbor shells their approach and money goes flying: "Shaftoe peers up through a blizzard of notes and sees giant bamboo poles soaring and bounding and windmilling toward the waterfront."

The leaves of Shanghai:
Pale doorways in a steel sky.
Winter has begun.

And the Prologue ends, and Chapter 1: Barrens, begins...

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From Wikipedia:
Cryptonomicon is a 1999 novel by American author Neal Stephenson, set in two different time periods. One group of characters are World War II-era Alliedcodebreakers and tactical-deception operatives affiliated with the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park (UK), and disillusioned Axis military and intelligence figures. The second narrative is set in the late 1990s, with characters that are (in part) descendants of those of the earlier time period, who employ cryptologic, telecom, and computer technology to build an underground data haven in the fictional Sultanate of Kinakuta. Their goal is to facilitate anonymous Internet banking using electronic money and (later) digital gold currency, with a long-term objective to distribute Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod (HEAP) media for instructing genocide-target populations on defensive warfare.