Search for the Buried Bomber

by Xu, Lei

  I craned my neck and looked. At the most, it was only one hundred feet tall, but seeing the still-damp waterline along the dam, I felt a lingering sense of fear. The deputy squad leader motioned to me to ask whether we should climb up. I was anxious to see what lay beyond, so I nodded. The two of us began to climb, one in front, one behind, cautiously making our way up the dam. Fortunately, the ladder proved quite sturdy, but as soon as we reached the top a violent wind began to blow, nearly knocking me off the dam. I quickly squatted down to keep my balance. I'd already heard the roar of a waterfall as we scaled the ladder. Up here the noise reached its peak, but there was more than just a waterfall. After finding my footing, I saw that after the dam stretched a deep abyss. It was into this that the underground river ceaselessly surged and fell. Incredibly, there was no sound of the falls striking bottom. I had no way of knowing how deep the abyss really went. More than that, the opening of the abyss—a vast and empty expanse—yawned as wide as it was deep. There was nothing for my flashlight to illuminate here, just some kind of giant subterranean void.

  An oppressive sense of emptiness came over me, something that hadn't occurred while on the river. Then as a cold, powerful wind came sweeping out of the darkness, we had to move away from the edge. "Why does it seem like there's nothing out there?" the deputy squad leader asked me. "It's like outer space. What is this place?"

  I searched the geological lexicon, but my brain could find no term suitable. I could think of only one way in which a place like this could have been created: after the limestone cave system had reached its final stage, an enormous portion of it had collapsed, forming this cavity. It was a marvelous geological spectacle. That I should actually see such a rare phenomenon in my lifetime made me feel, quite abruptly, as if I were about to cry. I continued to stare at it in astonishment when a loud boom suddenly rang out and several beams of light appeared from the side of the dam facing into the abyss. In a moment, all but two were extinguished. They then began to pivot side by side, seemingly from a fixed point, the beams sweeping through the darkness. A searchlight had been switched on. Someone was inside the dam!

  The deputy squad leader immediately became alert. "Could there still be Japanese soldiers here?" he asked in a low voice.

  Impossible, I thought to myself. "No," I said, beginning to smile. "It's probably Wang Sichuan!" I wanted to yell aloud to let him know we were here.

  Before I could utter a sound, dread enveloped me. My body went stiff. As I watched the searchlights probe that endless dark, I was unable to move a single step. I've always felt there are marked differences between the sensations of fright and dread. Fright originates from sudden occurrences. Though whatever causes the fright might not, in and of itself, be scary at all, it manages to become so by either suddenly appearing or disappearing. Dread is different. Dread results only after reflection and requires some time to ferment in the mind. For example, this dread I felt watching that unending dark, it manifested only after I'd begun to imagine what might be out there. In itself there was nothing scary about the dark. If you asked me what I saw down in that abyss, I could say only dread. For in fact, I saw nothing at all.

  How vast was the abyss? I had believed it would be comparable to something I'd seen or heard about, but as I watched the searchlights shine across it, I realized the word vast was entirely inadequate to describe its size. Military searchlight beams generally reach forty-five hundred to six thousand feet, meaning they can illuminate objects from over a kilometer away. This searchlight illuminated nothing, extending out into the abyss until at last the far end of it was swallowed up by the darkness. It was as if the beam had been aimed into the night sky. A moment later I understood. My jaw dropped open. The deputy squad leader saw my shocked expression. After hearing my explanation, his eyes went wide. Cold sweat trickled down my back. At once I understood why the devils had endured such hardships to transport a bomber down into this cave. They'd planned to fly it into the abyss.

  CHAPTER 31

  The Abyss

  The whole thing was beyond strange—not just the scene that lay before me, but also what the devils had done. It was all so creepy. It gave me a profound understanding of the deeply irregular way the Japanese behaved. I'm afraid that only a people as paranoid as them could have carried out such an aff air. A gigantic Shinzan bomber took off from an underground river thirty-six hundred feet underground, flew into a black abyss, and then disappeared. Over the many years that have passed since then, this image has stayed with me, like a nightmare that never goes away. I'm unable to shake it from my mind.

  I imagined the Japanese prospectors reaching this point. Certainly there were no natural wonders like this on an island nation like Japan. How must they have felt? Probably just as I did now. As they looked out at that boundless darkness, were they seized by an intense desire to explore it, to see what was hidden within?

  I continued to watch the point where the searchlight vanished. For a long time I was spellbound. At last a cold wind broke me from my trance, and I began to shake all over. I pulled myself together at once, muttering that this was no time to get excited. Romanticizing requires an environment both safe and secure. This place was neither.

  The searchlight beam began to move again. It has to be Wang Sichuan, I thought to myself. Helping each other along, the deputy squad leader and I made our way toward the light. In a place like this, finding another person was no small thing. We wanted to meet up with him as soon as possible and come up with a way out of here. Our assignment was finished. Although I feared the military would attempt to replicate whatever the Japanese had done, right now it had nothing to do with us.

  The searchlight was surely located within the facility's machine room, a place filled with the valves and mechanisms used to regulate the water level. We just didn't know where the entrance was. The deputy squad leader yelled out, "Engineer Wang," several times, but he knew his voice would never reach. As soon as the words left his mouth, they were swept up by the wind and carried away. Once we were right above the searchlight, we could see the beam was shooting from somewhere within the body of the dam, but there seemed no way in from up here. There was only a vertical iron ladder, like the one we'd just climbed, leaning against the outside of the dam, but it was honestly too terrifying. As brave as Wang Sichuan was, even he wouldn't have dared to descend from here into the black abyss. After walking a while more, we came upon a ruined part of the dam. A large section had caved in. Within the breach was a set of emergency stairs. Making our way down, we came upon an iron door on the side of the dam. We went inside.

  The room was pitch-black, but given how dark it was outside, this was nothing I wasn't used to. Sure enough, it soon became clear that the dam really had been designed for only short-term use. The concrete walls were covered with spreading cracks and exposed steel bars. The machine room might have been better termed a "machine facility." It was divided into a number of stories. The concrete floor was pockmarked with holes, looking similar to those in the half-torn-down buildings you see today. There were a number of wooden boxes near the entrance, covered by a dry oilcloth. Dust filled the air as we pulled it off. Through the holes in the floor we could make out a faint light, many stories down. It had to be the tail end of the searchlight. The primary machine room was probably at the very bottom. I could feel some vague sense of the gigantic apparatus down there. The wind had died down, but from outside the sound of water was still frighteningly loud. We called for quite some time, but there was no response. He couldn't hear us and we couldn't find a way down.

  "What now?" I asked the deputy squad leader.

  Each of the dam's floors was much taller than average building stories. Jumping was out of the question. The deputy squad leader dropped a piece of concrete through a hole in the floor, but we could neither see where it landed nor hear the sound it made. There was still no response from below.

  "It seems we can't get down from here," he said. "We'll have to find another way."

 
; I cursed to myself and shined the flashlight around the room. The light was almost out. This flashlight's lifespan was already way above average. It should have gone out much earlier, back when we were first exploring the sinkhole. There was no point placing any outsize hopes on it working much longer. I turned to the deputy squad leader. "First we have to find a new light source," I said. "Otherwise, when our flashlight goes out, we'll be stuck."

  We looked around. There were more than a few things we could burn, and who knew what was inside those wooden boxes stacked in the corner? The deputy squad leader forced one open. Inside were mostly power cables and welding rods, as well as a bag of alreadyhardened cement. These had probably been used to maintain the dam. Cement mortar has to be reapplied to the base and body of a dam every year, otherwise it will gradually push outward, becoming incredibly dangerous.

  After we'd taken four or five boxes apart in quick succession, the most useful things we found were a steel helmet and a cotton overcoat. The coat was exceedingly damp, almost as if I'd found it in a coffin dug up from the ground. The helmet, however, was still in fairly good shape and blocked some of the wind. We also discovered a box of water canteens. Having long since lost my own, I took one of these as well. At the time this little plundering spree didn't feel particularly notable, but in hindsight I get nervous just thinking about it. The canteen was key. It's the reason I'm here reminiscing and not still in that dam beneath the earth, slowly rotting away.

  The room itself was not large. After making a lap, we'd turned over just about everything in it. We could barely breathe from the dust and decay. We broke off several wooden sticks and wrapped them in oilcloth in preparation for when our flashlight went completely dead. As we were getting ready, there came a sudden droning wail from outside. The instant I heard it, I knew it was the siren. As we were so much closer this time, the noise was deafening. I'd already mentally prepared myself for this. Were the sluice gates closing? I wondered. What was going on? Could there be some automatic maintenance system installed in the dam? Luckily, we didn't have to worry about the water rising while we remained stuck on the wing of the wrecked bomber.

  Hoping to see what was happening with the river, we walked back outside. Suddenly, the deputy squad leader's brow wrinkled. "Engineer Wu," he said to me, "listen closely. This siren is different from the one we just heard." I listened, but could detect nothing new about it. "The sound is much longer," he said. "Now it can reach much farther away. This one sounds like the early-warning siren for an air raid."

  An air raid? There are air raids here too?

  CHAPTER 32

  Air Raid

  Ibelieved what the deputy squad leader said. After all, this was something the army drilled nearly every day. As I spent most of my time in the field, I knew little about air-raid sirens. Although there had been mandatory evacuation drills—once or twice a year—back when I was in school, we all knew it was just practice. We followed the teacher and it was a fun diversion. No one was paying attention to the frequency of the siren.

  There was not going to be an air raid here. That was beyond doubt. I was much more inclined to believe the alarm had some other function—warning, for example, that prisoners had escaped. The deputy squad leader told me that the early-warning air-raid siren would ring for thirty-six seconds, then stop for twenty-four seconds. It was an advanced alert for when an air raid was still only a possibility. As the planes approached, the siren would speed up, ringing for six seconds, stopping for six seconds.

  Hearing the alarm from within the machine facility was enough to make us tremble. We climbed back on top of the dam. Walking into the wind, we made our way back to the point above the searchlight beam. It had changed direction and was now strafing the gigantic open space overhead. In theory, the roof of the abyss could not possibly be more than thirty-six hundred feet up. Indeed, the faint bulge of cliff rock could be seen at the uppermost end of the searchlight, but the area of illumination was too small and I was unable to make out their actual shapes.

  There was no sign of any air raid—as if the frantic siren was all a joke. And though the searchlight swept back and forth above the void, there was nothing to see but rocks. After a while, its operator seemed to realize he was wasting his time. We watched as the beam again went level, then tilted down and began to illuminate the lower reaches of the abyss. We couldn't even hear the falling water hit bottom. How could this searchlight possibly illuminate anything that far down? I wondered. But when I crawled to the side of the dam and looked over, though the far end of the searchlight was rather dim, it was nonetheless able to illuminate the very bottom. The abyss was not that deep at all. Then I took a closer look: it was not the bottom being illuminated, but rather a huge sheet of mist that was floating slowly upward. It was as if the beam was shining upon a cluster of clouds in the sky. Although it might sweep back and forth, it could not penetrate their outer layer—like when we were young and we believed a lid must have been placed over the world. The mist was far from still. You could tell, albeit only vaguely, that it was slowly, almost rhythmically roiling and floating ever higher. This strange sight, matched with the immense and extraordinary background, only increased our agitation. Just what exactly was producing this mist? And what sort of geological formation was underneath?

  I'm ashamed to admit it, but despite hearing the chaotically ringing siren and watching what was happening, I somehow didn't connect the two. I just continued to stare, my mind filled with excitement and wonder. Little by little the mist rose ever nearer, the searchlight beam becoming shorter and shorter, until the earlywarning alarm suddenly stopped and abruptly changed to a much more urgent air-raid siren. Startled, I finally realized what was going on—the alarm was warning us about the mist! And it was now only six hundred feet below the dam. I remembered the corpse with the blackened gums in the sinkhole. My toes curled in fear. I could have slapped myself. How had I not realized this earlier? The mist carried some deadly poison!

  We had to get out of there at once. I grabbed the deputy squad leader, wanting to flee back the way we had come—at least to the wrecked plane, but the farther from here the better. He was even thicker than I—he didn't realize at all the danger the mist posed— but when I explained it, his face turned white with fear. Still, he wouldn't leave. He grabbed hold of me. "Not yet!" he said. "Wang Sichuan is still down there. We'd just be letting him die. We have to go save him. Otherwise we'd never be able to live with ourselves later."

  I felt both ashamed and worried, but it was too late to search for a way down. I looked again. I still couldn't see any sign the searchlight operator knew what was going on. The searchlight continued to focus on the mist below, swaying ever so slightly. What was he looking for? Then we both saw it—the iron ladder leading down into the abyss. It was only a few feet from us. We looked at one another. The deputy squad leader stretched his foot down onto the first rung. "Get out of here!" he said. "I'll go inform—" Before he could finish, the rung broke beneath him. His feet pedaled air, he dropped downward, and then he was falling.

  CHAPTER 33

  The Iron Chamber

  There was something supremely valiant about the way the deputy squad leader spoke that final sentence, like some hero in one of those old War of Liberation movies. Unfortunately, I was roused too late. All at once he dropped away. A split second later, I instinctively shot my arm out to grab him, but his fall had been too sudden. He dropped directly onto the nearly vertical wall of the dam and slid downward. I froze, terrified, then, in a flash, I lost my balance and very nearly tumbled down beside him. Fortunately, the dam was sloped, if only just barely. After hitting the wall, he slid no more than eight or nine feet before he managed to grab on to a section of the iron ladder's concrete base. This alone stopped him from immediately falling to his death, but his momentum was too great. He was barely able to grip the concrete, and his hands began to slip.

  I yelled to him not to panic, I was coming to get him. I got down on my stomach and leaned
over the side, but my arms weren't long enough to cover even half the distance. I leaned out farther, until half my body was over the edge, then farther still, but even when I was about to slide down, there still remained a huge gap between us. The deputy squad leader was a soldier, his strength and reflexes far superior to those of the average man. Seeing me stretch out my hand, he kicked off the wall with his feet, using this split second of momentum to leap upward, just high enough to grab hold of my hand. I took a deep breath and tried as hard as I could to pull him up, but I had misjudged both my strength and my position. I was extended too far over the side. His weight yanked me free from my perch and together we began to slide over the edge. Panicking, I swung my free arm desperately, but the way I was stretched out, even if I'd managed to grab something, I would never have been able to hold on to it. My surprise lasted for only a moment, then the deputy squad leader pulled me down. In that instant I saw his eyes register some complex emotion, but my mind was completely blank. Everything had happened much too fast.

  My chin immediately scraped against the rough concrete. I somersaulted and began rolling downward. My head knocked against the iron ladder, sending a terrible burst of pain through me. I reached out to grab it, but it was already too late. Down we tumbled, covering forty or fifty feet in the blink of an eye, all the way to the source of the searchlight. In a flash I saw a square window open on the side of the dam, a beam of white light shooting out of it. I couldn't open my eyes in the glare, and then I'd already rolled past.