by Xu, Lei
Old Cat, Pei Qing, and the rest of them had obviously had it much easier than I. This made me rather resentful. We’d entered the sinkhole on the basis of a note. If it was one of them who’d given it to me, then some irresponsible person had pushed us into a situation of considerable danger. Of course, falling into that enormous underground river had been mostly our fault. Had that not happened, who knows how things might have gone?
Wang Sichuan had long since related our experiences to those present, even going so far as to tell them that, most likely, there was an enemy spy on the team. Old Cat’s expression showed considerable displeasure. The list of dead was getting too long.
Telegraph room: three dead.
The generator in the sinkhole: one dead.
Workshop and warehouse: one dead and Su Zhenhua crazy.
Adding to this the madwoman Yuan Xile, then we’d already found seven of the first team, five of them dead—their deaths all abnormal—while those who’d survived had both gone crazy.
I told Old Cat that by now there were probably some things he should tell us. At the very least, I said, we need to know just how many people were on the first team. Pei Qing chimed in as soon as I said this, as did Wang Sichuan, Ma Zaihai, and the deputy squad leader. Pei Qing was quite agitated. His argument with Old Cat had gotten serious, and now he couldn’t hold himself back.
Old Cat and Old Tang were both silent. For a moment, both sides were deadlocked, no one saying a word. At last Old Cat abruptly relaxed, sighed, and then spoke. “All right. But I can only tell you this one thing and you must not ask me again. There is no benefit in you knowing too much—not for me, nor for all of you either.”
Go on and say it, I thought to myself. We understand. After we leave this place, no one will bring it up again.
Old Cat gave a rather strange laugh and said, “The first team entered here half a month ago. Nine people in total—four experts, four corpsmen, one specially appointed supervisor.”
“Nine people?” Ma Zaihai gulped. “Then there are still two people we haven’t found yet?”
Old Cat shook his head. “No,” he said, “just one.”
Ma Zaihai counted it out on his fingers, then counted again. Something was wrong.
“There was one person,” said Old Cat, “who came out alive.”
We stared at him in surprise. “Who was it?” asked Ma Zaihai.
Narrowing his eyes, Old Cat pointed at himself. “Me.”
CHAPTER 44
Old Cat
It was a long time before I could finally react. The others were no different. At last Wang Sichuan asked, “You mean to say you’ve already been here?”
Old Cat fished out a cigarette, lit it, then nodded.
Everything had been turned upside down. Quite a few people’s faces had gone white. We looked at each other in blank dismay. My mind remained in chaos, but then, as I thought about it once more, I wanted to laugh. It all made sense, I realized. Back when we first arrived, Old Cat had known the colonel and the rest of that gang had already long since discovered this cave. I thought this was the slyness of Old Cat reading the military, but if he’d already been down here, well, of course he would have known. And when the underground river rose, he was able to both appear just in the nick of time and know that the way forward was at the very top of the cavern. At the time, I had once more believed this was merely due to his wealth of experience. How had we been so naive?
For a short while everyone was silent. Pei Qing was the first to respond. “Mao Wuyue,” he said coldly, “I’ve known something was up with you for a long time, but I didn’t think you were involved this deeply. What exactly is going on here? Tell us, or don’t blame us if there’s no love lost.”
Old Cat leisurely shook his head. “I just told you that was all I could say. Our superiors have their own considerations. Anyway, it’s better for you all that I not say anything.”
“Goddamn it,” yelled Wang Sichuan. “What the fuck kind of leader are you supposed to be?” Jumping to his feet, he charged at Old Cat. Old Tang rushed in between them, grabbed Wang Sichuan, and twisted him into a pretzel. Old Tang was very agile, and the hulking Wang Sichuan was subdued in a moment. He wasn’t about to give up, though. As soon as Old Tang turned his back, Wang Sichuan seized him and flipped him onto the ground. The two of them twisted together. Pei Qing rushed over. My heart leaped in fear. Was this about to turn into a free-for-all? But Pei Qing meant only to mediate. He pulled the two of them apart.
Pointing at Wang Sichuan, Old Tang swore, “Are you a soldier or what? You think you’re some kind of intellectual, don’t you? Didn’t Old Cat just say he’s under orders? You’re a goddamn nobody. Are we supposed to listen to you or to headquarters?”
This might seem like no more than angry bluster, but Old Tang had raised two important points: First, it’s not that they weren’t saying it, it’s that they couldn’t say it. And second, the orders came from headquarters. This was a hint for us to ask no further. I knew Old Cat would die before he said anything he was sworn to conceal, even if it was as simple as the new location of the engineering brigade headquarters. Wang Sichuan was the kind of guy brave enough to hit a political commissar if his blood rose. I was afraid that if he did anything else he’d give someone reason to call him a counterrevolutionary, and then he’d really be done for. I ran over, grabbed him tight, and made him shut up.
Seeing how tense the atmosphere was, Ma Zaihai attempted to change the subject. “Leaders,” he said, “let’s not waste any more time. If there’s only one person left, could this be the same individual who just tried to kill Engineer Wu?”
The others hadn’t heard this part yet. A surprised look flashed across Old Cat’s face. “What do you mean, tried to kill him?” he asked. I told them how, just now, I was nearly buried alive in an ice pit.
Old Cat’s brows wrinkled as I finished my story. “Should we send someone to go look?” asked Old Tang.
Old Cat immediately waved his hand. “No need,” he said. “This thing’s not right!”
“What do you mean?” I asked. Old Cat replied that the first prospecting team had nine people in total, three of them women. The remaining survivor should be a woman, but based on my description, my attacker had been a powerful man.
“When you were attacked,” asked Wang Sichuan, “could you tell if it was a man or a woman?” I thought about it, then firmly stated how big he was. Back when I was a kid, I used to fight all the time in my village. Whenever I was hit I could always tell whether it was a boy or girl who was throwing the punches. If the person who attacked me was a man, then he wasn’t part of the first exploration team. Who was he? Why had another man appeared? Was it possible there really were Japanese soldiers down here?
Everyone began to talk at once. We went over it again and again, but couldn’t think of another possibility. Then Pei Qing quieted everyone down with a click of his tongue. With a dark look on his face he said, “Could it be Chen Luohu? He’s the only one missing.”
Wang Sichuan shook his head. “Impossible,” he said. “Chen Luohu’s too much of a coward to ever hit anyone.”
“You can’t just go by appearances,” Pei Qing said. “The more unimpressive someone looks, the more likely it’s just an act. I think he seemed a little over the top.”
What a mess, I thought. Old Tang waved his hand, quieting everyone down. He said the deputy squad leader and I were both injured, and he and the others were all exhausted from the journey here. For the time being, we should stop thinking about this and get some rest. He would arrange for some of his men to make a quick search of the area. When our energy had returned, we could discuss our next move.
It was true. I was exhausted. After Old Tang said this, we all calmed down. We split up and at once the atmosphere relaxed. They had already boiled some water and cooked the condensed vegetable paste. Now a few corpsmen ladled out a bowl for me. Seeing that I was cold, Old Tang gave me some of the chili sauce he’d brought along. One bite a
nd my whole body began to sweat. But I remained tired as ever. As I ate my eyelids drooped down and I nearly fell asleep.
I was once told that ancient warriors could sleep even while on horseback. In all my years of toiling for different prospecting teams across China, riding not only horses but every other domesticated animal besides dogs, never once had I been able to sleep on the back of some animal. Now I believed the stories. My sleepiness was so extreme that nothing else mattered. I just wanted all the world to go away. If someone wanted to kill me, then let it happen. I wanted only to sleep.
But I could not. Looking back toward the bonfire, I noticed that Old Cat and some others had unrolled a number of blueprints and were poring over their contents. These were the structural drawings they’d found near the telegraph room. I was sure of it. I climbed to my feet, walked over, and asked Old Cat if I could take a look as well. Old Tang told me I’d better rest, but I said I was fine and that I wanted to see what was really going on down here. Old Cat passed me one of the drawings. The thing was rather timeworn. It felt soft and limp in my hand. I spread it out on the ground. Wang Sichuan also came over. At a glance I could tell he was full of energy. Those goddamn nomads really are much stronger than us rice eaters, I thought. I forced myself to focus on the blueprint before me. It was the entire underground river system. In an instant I had found the markings for both the dam and the enormous River 0. The meticulousness with which the Japanese had designed these blueprints was astonishing. Both the large and small tributaries were rendered with incomparable clarity. The opening through which we entered the cave was distinctly marked. There seemed to be three more such entrances, all of them leading to other tributaries. The underground river system was truly immense. We gradually pressed closer, forming a tight circle around the map.
The underground river had seven tributaries in total. Numbers 3, 4, 5, and 6 all diverged from River 2, the river we began on. All four of these tributaries off River 2 eventually seeped out through cracks in the rock. This was why none had formed into a mature river, nor did any ultimately empty into a subterranean reservoir. The communications center at the end of River 6 was the only military installation at the end of any of these four tributaries. Were this river system compared to a large tree, River 2 would be the trunk and Rivers 3, 4, 5 and 6 would all be branches. Two other tributaries also formed a stand-alone system. After merging in the upper reaches of the cave, River 1 and River 7 became River 0, which flowed into the dam. Surprisingly, the area between the eight rivers was far from solid. Each of the rivers was connected to the others by a great mass of still-forming limestone tunnels, all of them distinctly depicted by the Japanese. By traversing these complex, mazelike caverns, they would have been able to smoothly shuttle from one river to the next. There were also a number of markings designating provisional generators like the small one we discovered on the sinkhole platform, as well as several symbols that we found unrecognizable. A question occurred to me as I looked at the drawing. I asked Old Cat what they were planning to do now. Why had they decided to keep going till they got all the way down here? Was it to rescue that final woman?
Old Cat shook his head and pointed at a section of the blueprint. “For this,” he said.
I looked where he was pointing. It was a spot just to the side of the dam. At first I thought he meant the Shinzan, but then I realized he was indicating the great void beyond. I didn’t understand. When I had looked upon that boundless darkness with my own eyes, my blood froze and my body shook, but on this drawing it was merely a blank expanse. Why was Old Cat interested in all that emptiness?
But Old Cat said nothing, just continued to smoke his cigarette. Old Tang then jumped in. He pointed to a long line of alternating long and short dashes. He motioned for quiet and in a low voice said, “First look at this line, then I’ll explain it to you.” I nodded and he continued: “The symbols used by the Japanese are different from ours, but we can guess what they mean. There are different kinds of lines all over the blueprint. Look. Solid lines represent electrical cables. They’re everywhere, like vines, all of them emerging from power stations. Now look at these dotted lines. They all end at telephone marks, so they must be telephone lines. But on the whole blueprint there’s only one line of long and short dashes. What is it supposed to represent?” He moved his hand along the dashes. “Look at the ends of the line. Do you see where this is?”
I followed his finger and looked. It was the telegraph room at the end of River 6. “Aha!” said Wang Sichuan beside me. “The telegraph room. In which case this line—”
“That’s right. This is the line that connects the telegraph room to its transmitting antenna. We were wrong. The antenna wasn’t on the surface. It was right here.” He pointed at the outer edge of the dam. Here the dashed line stopped and became an asterisk.
My hair stood on end. Goddamn! The transmission antenna was on the side of the dam, pointing out toward the void. The 1942-standard cipher they’d received didn’t originate on the surface. It came from the abyss itself. Twenty years ago, the Japanese had not only flown in, they’d sent a message back out!
CHAPTER 45
The Message
Old Tang’s voice was very calm as he spoke, but hearing him we all felt unspeakable terror. “Twenty years ago,”
he said, “a Japanese Shinzan bomber took off from a river thirty-six hundred feet below the earth’s surface. It soared over an underground dam and glided into the immense void just beyond, disappearing into the limitless darkness. None of us knows what the Shinzan encountered out there, or what the pilots saw.”
By itself this was crazy. Now we’d discovered a mysterious transmission had somehow come out of the darkness? Then I recalled the huge number of airdrop-ready supplies. It was obvious. This entire base had been set up to airdrop people into that abyss. Arriving some twenty years earlier, the Japanese must have asked themselves the moment they looked into the void: What is this place, what’s inside, and how do we get down there? It was evident that not only had they solved this final question, they’d also sent back a message from within.
After discovering this place, the Japanese proceeded to build a vast infrastructure, then successfully used a long-range bomber to airdrop people and supplies into the abyss. And the crashed Shinzan was certainly not the first plane flown into the abyss. The small night fighter whose wreckage we discovered earlier had surely been used in some sort of trial run. Even though, in the end, the bomber crashed, the entire course of events could still be described as “magnificently insane.”
I asked Old Tang what he intended to do now.
Corpsmen are different from us prospectors. Corpsmen must be rigorous, testing and verifying everything to ensure their reports are always 100 percent correct. This was the work standard promulgated by Chairman Mao. The engineering corps is forever at the forefront of the military, paving roads through mountains and building bridges across rivers. The least mistake could lead to failure and military disaster. Sure enough, Old Tang told us that they had to make completely certain that the signal was emerging from the abyss. Such a verdict could not be made without verification. That’s why they’d come all the way down to the dam. Now they needed to find a way to the abyss side of the dam to look for the antenna. It was this search that had originally led them down to the warehouse level. The search-and-rescue mission had to continue as well. The situation outside the dam was unknown, so making any too-specific plans would be pointless. The corpsmen would finish the search of the dam while we prospectors stayed behind. Our job was already complete.
It’s been complete for a long time, I thought to myself. There wasn’t going to be some humongous oil lake at the bottom of the void. It was evident the Japanese activity here had little to do with resource prospecting. Our assignment had already been finished before we’d even entered the cave.
No one spoke in opposition to Old Tang. Old Cat said nothing, just silently drank his tea and listened to us. Looking at his expression, he seeme
d to feel that what we were discussing was ridiculous. At the time I couldn’t have cared less what he thought. Never would I have expected that, soon enough, I would feel the same way.
With reality feeling as surreal as a nightmare, I drifted into sleep and long, vivid dreams. The vast abyss had become a tremendous mouth. I was standing atop the dam, facing into the gale-force winds and watching the abyss expand toward me. All around me the rock walls slowly corroded into the darkness. Then I was sitting in a plane, aimlessly flying through the void. There was nothing around, the flight unending.
Despite my terror, I didn’t wake up. I slept for ten hours straight. At last, when it was time to eat, Wang Sichuan awoke me. Old Tang had already left with some of the others. Old Cat was gone as well. He was leading a group of corpsmen investigating the factory and warehouse. There had to be a heavy-duty freight elevator somewhere nearby. I was sure Old Cat was more than just a simple prospector, otherwise he could never have convinced Rong Aiguo to dispatch the rescue team. My intuition said this affair went far beyond my understanding. I didn’t want to think about any of it anymore.
As I ate, I listened to Pei Qing and Wang Sichuan discussing the dam. They were attempting to infer what the icehouse had been used for. We had only a vague idea of the layout of the average dam, and this one was far from ordinary. The purpose of most of its installations—icehouse included—was a mystery to us. All we knew for sure was that on both sides of the dam were identical caissons, capable of transporting supplies underwater. Beneath the dam’s water level was a huge icehouse filled with countless frozen bombs. Beyond that was a factory and warehouse piled high with supplies.