Search for the Buried Bomber

by Xu, Lei

  Any sense of order had now been lost. Could there really be ghosts in here? No one spoke. We could hear one another breathing heavily. And the atmosphere, well, our minds had all gone blank, so there was no atmosphere to speak of. Time passed little by little. Perhaps it was two hours, perhaps four. No one spoke a word. Now that the agitation had passed, exhaustion surged over us like an ocean tide. There came a long period of semiconsciousness, but I was far from asleep. In all my life I'd never felt weariness like this. As a geological prospector, there'd been numerous times I did not sleep for days, but I was always able to regulate my level of exhaustion. We were all born not long after the beginning of the War of Resistance. Even in childhood, we had to labor under conditions so arduous they would be difficult to imagine. Physical tiredness meant little to us, but this sort of total psychic fatigue was something else entirely.

  Slowly, though, my mind did become more placid. I don't know precisely how long it all lasted. I'd imagine that what brought me back was the chill that ran through my body once the cold sweat had dried. Or it could have been the hunger. I took a deep breath, turned off my flashlight, and looked around for a place to sit. How long since I'd last eaten, I wondered, and how long had I already been inside this chamber? Here there was neither night nor day. Everything had been thrown into disorder. In those days, watches were considered home appliances. Given that even the supply of lighters was restricted, you can imagine how much harder it was to acquire a watch. As my senses returned, I began to think deeply, almost as if forced. The details of the entire circumstance were released into my mind with no way for me to stop their advance. I later told Old Cat that it was only at this point that I really began to consider what was going on. You could say that the way I thought about things somehow opened up. I've always felt that the moderate professional success I've achieved since then was catalyzed by this very experience. Though it might seem incomprehensible to many, there were a lot of people like me in those days—simple and naive, our problem-solving methods unfailingly direct. This was probably because our news and information was severely limited. You can ask your parents to relate how simplistic the plots of our movies and model-theater performances were—persons good and bad could be clearly distinguished based solely on what they looked like. Back then we almost never considered issues of too great complexity. It was this immaturity on our parts, this belief that things should be simple, that allowed the Ten-Year Calamity (the Cultural Revolution) to be so destructive.

  At first, my mind was filled entirely with scenes of Yuan Xile and Chen Luohu's disappearance, all occurring beneath the swaying beam of a flashlight, until I felt dizzy. Then my mind began to move. Just how had it all happened? There had to be something unusual about this chamber that we were unaware of. In a deep recess thirty-six hundred feet underground, within a strange airtight chamber built into a ruined installation abandoned by the Japanese decades before—in a situation in which it was absolutely impossible to disappear—two very alive people were suddenly nowhere to be seen. Assuming they really were gone, then at some point during the several minutes when our attention slackened and we weren't watching them, something must have occurred. But what?

  I tried as hard as I could to recall anything that had felt even the slightest bit amiss. When Yuan Xile disappeared, it had been amid total darkness. All of our attention had been focused on finding a flashlight. We'd ignored any sounds that might have been occurring around us. Yuan Xile could have used that moment to do anything she wanted. When Chen Luohu disappeared, the room had been only half dark, but all of our attention had been focused on the opening to the air shaft. We were completely blind to anything happening behind us. Both times somebody disappeared, all our attention had been concentrated on a single spot. I sighed and a preposterous thought appeared in my mind. Was it possible that in here, as soon as you stopped thinking about someone, they would vanish?

  This was truly absurd, but as soon as the thought occurred to me, my whole body suddenly went cold and I realized: I wasn't paying attention to Ma Zaihai and the deputy squad leader! With a start I came back to reality, hurriedly twisting my head around, looking for the two of them. Darkness surrounded me. At some point, their flashlight beams had been extinguished, but I hadn't noticed. A wave of panic rushed over me. I groaned involuntarily. I sank into a state of extreme, irrational fear. I was so scared that my entire body curled in on itself. I was unable to force a single breath into or out of my chest. I made myself scream out, though the barest sounds were all I could manage. There was no response. I truly was the only person left in that pitch-black room. I felt another splitting headache, as if my skull were bursting open. The brief calm I'd experienced disappeared at once. I cried out as loud as I could and switched my flashlight back on.

  For the briefest moment, I genuinely believed that I was looking at an utterly empty room. I alone had been abandoned within these hellish ruins, trapped inside a secret pitch-black chamber, poisonous mist just beyond the door, and everyone who was with me had vanished like ghosts. A more awful plight could not be conceived. Had it truly been as bad as all that, I'm afraid I would have promptly gone mad. The difference between novels and socalled reality is that, while novels often go to extremes, in reality people are rarely forced into such desperate straits. As soon as I switched on my flashlight, I saw Ma Zaihai standing before me, having seemingly appeared out of thin air. His face was white as a dead man's and he seemed to be groping around the wall for something. I yelled in fright as soon as I saw him. He immediately shrank back several feet. The beam of a second flashlight shot across the room and swept toward me. It was the deputy squad leader, standing in another corner of the iron chamber and watching us with a perplexed look on his face.

  Though I relaxed a little, I was still furious. "What the hell were you doing?" I asked them. "Why did you turn off your flashlights and not say a word?"

  Ma Zaihai had gone totally stiff. I had scared him half to death and he was speechless. The deputy squad leader stepped in and explained. He'd realized that when the other two disappeared, the iron chamber had been almost totally dark. He wondered if there wasn't some sort of mechanism that turned on when all the lights were off. So he'd asked the two of us to turn off our flashlights and see what we could find. I'd turned mine off just as he'd said this, so he'd assumed I'd heard.

  Seeing that the two of them were still here, I began to calm down. "I thought you two had disappeared as well," I told them. The way their eyes widened said they'd had the same worries. Being regular soldiers, though, they were different from me. They had just taken their feelings, placed them in the back of their minds, and ignored them.

  "Did you find anything?" I asked them. Ma Zaihai shook his head.

  In this we were deceiving ourselves once more. If we were un able to find anything in the light, then how could anything be found in total darkness? But for a man like the deputy squad leader to have thought of this was still rather impressive. The educational level of engineering corpsmen was far from high. At most they would have received a bit of training in their specialty, and that was it. It's like they used to say about the three treasures of the heroic railway corps: a spade, a pickax, and a worn-out quilted jacket. That's how the special-engineering divisions were back then.

  We gathered together and sat down. Each of our faces wore the same serious expression. "Let's not panic," I told them. "From now on, we three will stick close together, so if someone else disappears the rest of us will be sure to know what's going on!" They both nodded. It was gratifying to see our morale rise. The situation hadn't changed a bit—my stomach rumbled its intense hunger, and the problems we faced remained legion—but seeing the two soldiers before me I felt secure.

  According to materialistic thought, all these strange things we encountered had to have rational explanations, no matter how far-fetched these rationalizations might be. Admittedly, we did often discover that these seemingly forced interpretations were in fact correct, but right now I
feared materialistic explanation would simply no longer suffice. I began wondering what would happen if Yuan Xile and Chen Luohu never reappeared. Assuming we made it out of here alive, how would we explain that? The two of them had vanished like ghosts, and where were they now? Had they disappeared completely, or ended up in some other place?

  I raised my head and looked around. Not once had I considered the purpose of the iron chamber itself. Based on how it was furnished, it seemed to be either an alternate command center or some kind of safe room, a temporary refuge when the poison mist rose up from the abyss, but was this really the case? It was unimaginably fantastic what the devils had built here. At the end of an enormous natural grotto, we'd found a massive dam and warplane, their presence basically inexplicable. So, given that the Japanese intent was still unfathomable, was it possible this iron chamber was part of some overarching plan?

  I stood up and looked at the four walls around me. Suddenly a question appeared in my mind: What was behind them? Concrete? Or something I couldn't even guess? I ran my fingers along the iron. It was bumpy and rough, as if corroded by some strong acid. Traces of white paint remained, none larger than a fingernail. The wall was ice-cold. As soon as I placed my palm to it, all the heat was sucked from my body. No, I suddenly realized, this was much too cold! The temperature was like that of the underground river, so cold as to be unendurable.

  I stuck my ear to the wall. The deputy squad leader and Ma Zaihai stared. "What is it?" Ma Zaihai asked.

  I raised my hand to tell him to not make any noise. I had already heard something. At first I couldn't identify it, then a moment later it dawned on me. It was the sound of water, but not the roar of the river crashing against rock. This was a noise I was familiar with. I come from a family of fishermen. It was the dreary swooshing of the underwater current rubbing against the sides of a boat. In my astonishment I listened again, and indeed I was not mistaken, but I knew it was impossible. The iron chamber was above the generator room. I distinctly remembered the water level was many floors beneath our feet. Even if the sluice gates had closed while we were in here, the underground river would never have risen this high. I related my discovery to Ma Zaihai and the deputy squad leader. They were both perplexed, but when they pressed their ears to the wall, they could hear it as well. Smiling bitterly, Ma Zaihai asked, "So what does this mean? Are we underwater now?"

  I grabbed the grapnel and struck it forcefully against the iron wall. There was a bang. Sparks flew off the wall. The sound was low and deep, totally unlike the cry emitted by hollow metal. We truly were surrounded by water. I was stunned. Then I realized that beyond this chamber, beyond the water, there was sure to be another gigantic iron wall. The iron chamber was independent from the rest of the dam and wrapped in a huge iron chute. I slapped myself. How had I not thought of this earlier? What part of a dam's interior installation would require a thing like this? It was all too simple. As far as I knew, there was only one device that would necessitate just such an iron shell!

  CHAPTER 38

  The Caisson

  On several of the large-scale dams the Japanese built in the thirties and forties—for example the one in Fengman on the Songhua River—the electrical generating units were located roughly thirty feet underwater. During construction, these dams required a special kind of freight elevator—called a "caisson"—to take workers and machinery underwater for installation and generator maintenance. These caissons were generally steel-bar-reinforced iron boxes in vertical cement chutes. Although usually dismantled once testing on the dam had been completed, they sometimes continued to serve as the only way to reach the dam's lower levels during periods of maintenance and repair. To my knowledge, the only kind of rooms you ever find completely encased in iron are these freight elevators—these caissons. I looked around the room. Was this iron chamber just such a device?

  If so, then that triple-proofed iron door was really the entrance to an elevator. My mind seemed to abruptly open up and a number of things occurred to me all at once. The creaking sound I'd heard within the chamber—the one I'd thought was pressure bearing down on the dam—had it been the chamber rubbing against the iron elevator tracks? Could it be that after we stepped into the room, the caisson had actually begun to move? As I listened again to the sound of water outside the chamber, I wondered: In the time it took us to enter the room, could someone have started the thing up? Was it possible that, unknowingly, we'd already descended beneath the water to the dam's lowest level?

  This guess seemed absurd once I thought it all the way through. If it really did happen, how had we completely failed to notice? But as I thought back on what had just taken place, I couldn't reject the idea. For if it really were as I surmised, then there was now a highly rational explanation for the disappearances of Yuan Xile and Chen Luohu. I focused my attention on a single portion of the iron chamber. Oddly, not once during my recent panic had I taken any note of this area. Why had I never thought of this place when, in actuality, it was the most likely place someone could disappear to? Far, far more likely than the lunchbox-sized ventilation tunnel. I'm referring to the airtight door, of course.

  I walked up to it and looked through the small aperture. I could see a faint bit of light, though this light appeared not to be coming in from outside, but rather the reflection of our flashlight beams on the glass. The scene appeared no different than when we had first entered. As I looked at the door, I became lost in thought. This idea was very simple—that people might leave a room through its door. We'd neglected to think of it because we'd believed that outside the door was toxic mist. We believed that if Yuan Xile and Chen Luohu had exited through this door, not only would they have died, but the mist would have invaded the room. We reasoned that since none of us had died, the door must have remained shut, but if the iron chamber had already dropped to the lower levels of the dam, then there was no poisonous gas outside. Therefore, once the emergency light went out, Yuan Xile would have been able to slip through the darkness, open the door, and step through. The same went for Chen Luohu. The problem was whether a certain prerequisite to my whole line of reasoning had been fulfilled: Was there really no poison gas outside the door?

  I told the deputy squad leader and Ma Zaihai my idea. Ma Zaihai shook his head at once. Impossible, he said. If a thing as large as the iron chamber really did descend, the people within it would have to notice. And how had Yuan Xile managed to find the door with such precision in the dark? And what about the sound of the door opening—why hadn't we heard it? The deputy squad leader was silent, his head down, but based on his expression it was evident he agreed with Ma Zaihai.

  He had a point. How had Yuan Xile known so clearly where the door was located? And how had she managed to avoid the chaos of everyone's arms and legs within the darkness, passing right beside us without making a sound? She wasn't a cat. I sat perplexed, staring at the layout of the iron chamber. There, in the center of the room, was the long iron table. It was covered in the papers we'd thrown about as well as fragments of something unidentifiable. The table stretched a long way, from the corner Yuan Xile had curled up in to right in front of the door. None of us had gone so far as to climb on top of the table during the earlier chaos. As long as Yuan Xile had crawled along the table, she would have been able to make it to the airtight door with great speed and ease. And when Chen Luohu vanished, all of our attention had been focused on the ventilation shaft.

  Ma Zaihai went over to look at the table. It was a wreck. Of course, no trace of such an exit could be seen. In other words, there was nothing whatsoever to support my idea.

  The three of us stared blankly. I had become rather uncertain how to proceed. My hypothesis did nothing to mitigate the anxiety we all felt. Rather, it added a number of new reasons for agitation. We began to waver and our distress became like a web we had woven around ourselves, the circumstances behind the black iron door like some constant nightmare, ceaselessly pressing down on us. If it really was as I said and no toxic gas remain
ed, then we should open the door without hesitation and figure out where exactly Yuan Xile and Chen Luohu had run off to. But if I was wrong, then opening the door would be suicide. We passed this time in spiritual torment. The development that made us feel most helpless was that there were no developments at all. In the chamber, time passed bit by bit, our hunger growing increasingly intense. Having no other choice, we were eventually forced to make one of the corners a makeshift bathroom. It soon stunk to high heaven. It felt as if time had stopped moving, every minute seeming to last for an eternity. No one brought up what we were supposed to do next. We were all watching the door, each of us knowing that, once it was opened, all our questions would immediately be answered.

  As a matter of fact, we were caught in a kind of battle between materialism and superstition, as if the purpose of all this was to see which side we would choose. Could we rationally go through the possible choices, or, overwhelmed by fear, would we resort to belief in ghosts and the supernatural? As a devout Communist Party member and officer in the PLA, the choice should have been obvious for me. In reality, though, I was just as afraid as any ordinary person would have been. All manner of complex emotions swirled within me.

  From a certain perspective, given that three of us were men— especially men born into destitute peasant-class families—to stay in a sealed room stinking of piss and shit for a couple of hours, with hungry stomachs to boot, wasn't actually that terrible. If our plight had had a definite endpoint—one day, for example, or one week—it absolutely would have been bearable, especially if it were an integral part of some official assignment. Compared to getting dragged off to India to go war, this was considerably more leisurely. What was unbearable was that our predicament had no defined limit. So long as no one opened that door, this would all continue until we died. As I thought about it, the pores all across my body seemed to burst open.