by Xu, Lei
With his mouth full of mashed vegetables, Wang Sichuan spoke: “The way I see it, we’re already at the lowest level of the dam. If they really were planning on blowing it up, then it wouldn’t make sense to place the bombs anywhere but the very bottom.”
But why did they freeze all the warheads? Such measures were only required for nitroglycerin, but that stuff could never be used in an artillery shell. The heat produced when the chemical was released would cause the inner warhead to explode much quicker than the outer shell, and the danger in transporting the stuff would have been too great. There was one other thing that required lowtemperature preservation: biological weapons.
While it’s a fact that the Japanese conducted biological warfare throughout China, most civilians have only heard of the atrocities of Unit 731—the inhuman Japanese biological research center. Having trekked through China’s forests and explored her caves, we prospectors know Unit 731 was only the tip of the iceberg. In my dozens of years on the job, I’ve come across innumerable cement structures located deep in the forests of the Northeast. All had been built by the Japanese during their invasion of China, and every last one was basically demolished. Nonetheless, evidence of dungeons and dissecting rooms could still be discerned. A comrade in arms told me that, in addition to these research labs, the scale of germ warfare in China was far greater still.
These bombs were probably not biological weapons. What purpose would they have served? The Japanese objective in the area was clear. Why line the base of the dam with weapons like that? I returned to my original question: What had the Japanese planned to do with all those bombs? A thought then occurred to me. What would happen if the refrigeration compressors stopped working? Even though the temperature here was very low, the ice would eventually begin to melt. And then what would become of the warheads?
The icehouse didn’t seem as large as I’d thought. I could hear the sounds of loud movement from that direction. Every now and then soldiers would return. These new recruit tenderfoots were so cold the mucus streamed from their nostrils. They really were just kids. The wait was very dull. We chatted for a bit, but Wang Sichuan couldn’t keep still. Soon he cried out that we should go see what they were up to. We wrapped overcoats tightly around ourselves, then walked back up the stairs, through the pitch-black tunnel, and into the icehouse. We headed toward the sounds. We’d taken no more than twenty steps when I realized something was different. It seemed to have grown colder. Frost had already formed across my eyebrows. That had never happened before. It felt as if we’d been caught in a blizzard in the Greater Khingan range. Before long I could see the shape of someone up ahead. It was Old Tang stamping his feet and smashing something into the ground. They were breaking a hole in the ice.
Several privates were wielding simple tools, sparing no effort as they smashed them down. They didn’t seem to be having much effect. They’d produced only a thin layer of powdery ice. Still, what they were doing was dangerous. There were bombs below.
I walked over to Old Tang. “You’d better be careful,” I told him. “What is the purpose of all this?”
Shivering, his lips purple from the cold, he told me to look at what was underneath the ice. Beneath our feet I saw a large black shadow, but because the top layer had already been smashed rough and uneven, I couldn’t tell what I was looking at. It certainly wasn’t a bomb. This thing was huge. I took a lap around it. The shadow was shaped like a giant paper clip. All along its length were numerous U-shaped protrusions. I gasped. It was a large-scale radio antenna. We knew one of these had to be around here somewhere, but what was it doing frozen beneath the ice?
On closer inspection I realized that the antenna wasn’t the only thing down there. There was a second shadow, also giant, although comparatively dim. It must have been buried in a deeper layer of ice. This shadow was three times as large as the antenna and appeared to be a massive strainerlike disc.
“What the hell is that?” I asked Old Tang, shivering and pointing at the monster paper clip. “Is it the antenna you’re looking for? What’s it doing in the ice?”
“It’s not the antenna,” he replied. “This thing’s got a nickname. It’s called the ‘Würzburg Giant.’”
“What? What giant?”
Putting it simply, he said, the Würzburg Giant is a kind of tracking radar the Japanese imported from Germany. Its main function was to automatically control searchlights during nighttime air defense. While in China, the Japanese hadn’t needed such advanced nighttime tracking technology, so you don’t see too many of them. Most were set up on the Inner Mongolian and Pacific Ocean fronts. China later unsuccessfully attempted to copy the device’s design. The technology eventually died out, but during the war it was the most advanced tracking equipment around. Old Tang said that he too had been shocked to come across a shadow this large, but the thing itself was probably not as big as it looked. Different thicknesses at different layers of the ice distorted the images below. The device would have been used for guided navigation, though this one might be just a spare. Precision guidance would have been a necessity for flying a plane down here.
Wang Sichuan asked Old Tang what they planned to do with the thing once they dug it up. Could this have something to do with the telegram?
“It’s more than just that,” said Old Tang. He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. On it were several rough pencil sketches. Old Tang’s group had been searching the icehouse, looking for the caisson controls and attempting to gain a preliminary understanding of the place. The sketches were representations of the icehouse’s layout. The compression engines and electrical circuits that surrounded the room were all marked. The shadows beneath the ice had also been clearly noted. Old Tang pointed to several spots with his pencil. “The shells that you mentioned are vast in number and spread all around the icehouse, forming a ring. In the center is the Würzburg Giant. Look at these lines here. These ladderlike shadows are the tracks used to transport the device. We also found four black shapes alongside the Würzburg Giant, each the size of a PLA truck. Those are probably the two groups of searchlights that accompany it.” I nodded and he continued. “This doesn’t seem extremely odd to you? Placing a guided navigation radar device at the center of a ring of bombs? What’s the point of it?”
I was already much too cold to think. Wang Sichuan sneezed and said, “Could it be a trap?”
I understood what he meant. After engineering corpsmen lay land mines on the battlefield, they set up some phony target to get the enemy to approach. If the fuse covers on all these bombs had in fact been removed—meaning they were poised and ready to explode—then Wang Sichuan’s suggestion did seem fairly reasonable. But a radar device in the middle—what kind of bait was that? Who were they hoping to attract? Then again, maybe they’d wanted to guide the plane to smash into the dam, destroying everything.
This didn’t make any sense, but I lacked the strength to consider it any further. The icehouse was too cold. I could endure it no longer. Old Tang told us to go back to the warehouse, saying that if we really wanted to help, we could go assist Old Cat. After returning to camp, we drank several cups of hot water and didn’t want to go anywhere. Something didn’t seem right. I began to feel increasingly uneasy.
Then it occurred to me: perhaps the reason the Japanese abandoned this place wasn’t as simple as we had thought. Nowhere in this entire system of rivers and caves had we seen any evidence suggesting the Japanese had tried to destroy the base. Everything had been left in good order. A great quantity of supplies remained neatly stacked and essentially unblemished. Even the various files and documents were left intact. We’d found a pilot’s corpse within the Shinzan, but where were the other members of the flight crew? Why had the corpse been left in the pilothouse? I don’t know whether the cold from outside had penetrated the warehouse or if my thoughts were just that unsettling, but I began to shiver uncontrollably. I still remember that feeling. It wasn’t fear, just the shock piled on shock of limitless discoveries
coming to light one after the other. A thought flashed across my mind. What if this base had already been abandoned by the time the Shinzan flew back?
There must have been something strange about my expression, because both Wang Sichuan and Pei Qing were looking at me oddly. Wang Sichuan asked whether it wouldn’t be best for me to sleep a little longer. When one’s body is in revolt, he said, it isn’t wise to push it.
I shook my ahead. “What do you guys think?” I asked them. “How long did that Shinzan fly around the abyss before it returned?”
“What do you mean?” asked Wang Sichuan.
“Is it possible,” I continued, “that after the Shinzan flew into the abyss there was some kind of emergency up here and everyone was forced to leave, so that when it flew back out there was already no one left? With no guidance from the ground, the pilot would definitely crash. His corpse was then left behind in the wreckage of the plane, while those still living among the flight crew disappeared to who knows where.”
The problem was that I had no idea how long a Shinzan could stay aloft. Later, I checked. Flying at full speed, it could cruise for ten to fourteen hours. Given that this base spanned the entire cave system, evacuating it would take at least one hundred hours. But Wang Sichuan wasn’t one for details. He agreed that it seemed reasonable enough. Pei Qing wasn’t so sure. “Based on the way the place looks,” he said, “it hardly seems as if there was an emergency. They didn’t dismantle the transmitter. Even the codebook was left behind. Even with an army on their doorstep, they wouldn’t have behaved so carelessly.”
It felt not like they’d evacuated, but as if everyone on the base had suddenly disappeared. Old Tang had said something like this as well. It seemed like the Japanese had planned on returning, he’d said. It was as if they were only handing the base over temporarily, but then they’d never come back. Something beyond our imaginations had happened here. The state of this base in its final dozen or so hours remained absolutely unfathomable. And it seemed highly likely that whatever had happened, it didn’t begin until after the Shinzan flew into the abyss.
The more I thought about it, the less I understood. After standing back up, I went to look at the sand table, hoping to draw some clue from it. Then Wang Sichuan suddenly let out a quizzical “Huh?” He raised his head and began to look around. I did the same, only to discover that he wasn’t looking, he was listening. From someplace far overhead, the air-defense warning rang out once more. It was a deep sound and very faint. If you didn’t listen closely, it was easy to mix up with the noise from the exhaust fan.
Pei Qing looked at his watch. The alarm continued to ring for a long time, then all of a sudden it stopped. He relaxed. “It rang for three minutes. This means the state of warning has been canceled.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. Buddha preserve us, I said to myself. Things up top are finally getting better. Before I could finish my thought, there came a great noise of machinery springing to life. The sound was all around us, now rising, now falling, seeming to resound from every corner of the dam. Several young soldiers rushed animatedly from the recesses of the warehouse. Good news, they told us. The dam had finished releasing the floodwater. Now, they believed, the mist would soon retreat below the warning line.
Wang Sichuan was about to ask how they knew this when there was a commotion over by the entrance to the icehouse. Several of Old Tang’s soldiers appeared, carrying some object. They called out for us to help. The thing was terribly heavy. Even with four of them carrying it, they were barely doing more than dragging it along the ground. We hustled toward them. It was a great chunk of ice, the size of a coffin. Wang Sichuan shouted for me to hurry up. Gritting his teeth, he put his hands underneath it and together they lifted it off the ground. Pei Qing and I tried to help, but the privates told us they were OK. More were coming, they said. Another group of soldiers hefting a second slab appeared only a moment later. I called some of the others over and, giving it all we had, we lifted it up. It felt uncommonly heavy. Then I saw something was frozen inside.
We brought the ice block over to camp and set it down. The force of the fall smashed several inches off the bottom. I asked what they’d dug up. The soldiers rolled the block over so I could see. A corpse was frozen inside.
“It’s one of the goddamn invaders,” said a soldier. “We just found him, frozen to death in the ice.”
The corpse had its arms wrapped around itself, its appearance haggard. The irregular surface of the ice distorted the figure within, but I could tell he was draped with an overcoat, his body small and frail. He looked no different than a child.
CHAPTER 46
The Dead Woman
In the later stages of the war, the Japanese had been hard-pressed for troops. The final batches of soldiers sent to Inner Mongolia were all very young. The Japanese also have small builds in general, otherwise we wouldn’t call them “Little Devils.” So the height of the corpse was perhaps rather normal.
“There are a bunch more down there,” said one of the privates, “all of them hanging off the radar device. Goddamn, we were digging and digging and then from out of the ice appeared this black face. Scared the hell out of me, and I smacked myself in the head with my pickax.”
We all cracked up, but the deputy squad leader berated the soldier. “Look at your pitiful expression. How can you bear to act like such a fool? Why aren’t you getting back to work?”
This soldier was probably one of the deputy squad leader’s. At once he stopped laughing, straightened the block out, and ran back. I wanted to help out as well, but the deputy squad leader said there was no need. It was too cold out there, and they could barely endure it. Once they’d brought in all the corpses, they were coming back. They’d been forced to give up.
Very soon Old Tang returned as well. He shook the frost from his hair, whole swaths falling to the ground, then went straight to the fire, hoping to warm up. His face was cracked from the cold. Two or three more blocks of ice were carried in, then everyone filed back through the door. I could feel the temperature rise once the icehouse door was shut. “There are still several more corpses,” said Old Tang, “but we’re not going to dig them out. We’ll freeze to death if we try.”
The temperature in the icehouse must have continued to fall, although I didn’t know why. We drew close to the fire and its heat helped us regain some of our spirit. The group of young corpsmen drank cup after cup of warm tea. Some of the others crowded around the frozen corpses, looking them over with curiosity. Pei Qing was especially interested, turning over block after block. He seemed unwilling to stop until every last one of their faces was revealed. He was so tired he began raspily gasping for breath. I wondered what he was looking for. After turning one over, his face suddenly went white. At once he stopped what he was doing and squatted down.
Carrying my cup of tea over, I asked what he’d discovered. He appeared to be in disbelief. “A woman,” he said.
The young soldiers had been yakking away, but as soon as he said this, they went silent and snapped their heads in our direction. I could feel something strange in the air, a shiver of excitement that felt out of place. We looked over at them and they back at us. There was something odd and too eager about their expressions. One of them stood up and came over. Then the rest followed, until they’d all crowded around the frozen corpse.
At the time it felt rather awkward, but I later realized this was all perfectly normal. The corpsmen were young and full of vigor. They spent the whole year trekking through remote and thickly forested mountains, laying roads and building bridges. It was an arduous job, nearly impossible for women, and so any opportunity to see one was, as they say, a joy to the eyes and pleasing to the mind. Not to mention that for those of us from that generation, any female Japanese soldier was inevitably associated with Yoshiko Kawashima, the Japanese spy. The name was practically synonymous with seduction and lust. These were young guys, so even though it was only a corpse, it was still enough to make their cheeks blu
sh and their ears turn red.
I looked over the corpse. With the warehouse still quite cold, the ice block was basically unmelted. All of the corpses were clad in similar attire, though this one was much more petite. With one glance you could tell it was a woman. Her hair was the giveaway, worn in a bun. In China, female soldiers always cut their hair short, but for Japanese female soldiers, this seemed to be the only hairstyle that existed. That was all I could make out. After looking at her for a few minutes, the engineering soldiers realized she was completely different from the image of Yoshiko Kawashima they had in their minds. Dejected, they slunk back to the fireside. Only Pei Qing continued to stare at her. I called his name. He looked up. The trace of an odd, nearly imperceptible expression flashed across his face, but then it was gone. A moment later he sighed and said, “It’s just a little girl. Those devils had no qualms at all about making her a soldier.”
“Women are never free from blame in wartime,” said Wang Sichuan, nearby. “Know how many Chinese she’s killed? What’s there to take pity on?”
Pei Qing’s face twisted, but he forced a smile. Then suddenly he turned to me. “Old Wu, help me boil some water. Let’s melt her out. I want to see what she’s got on her.”
“Huh?” I said. “What are you thinking now?”
He explained that in the Japanese military, women were generally either assigned to special units or they worked as secretaries for officers. And though they could be quite young, their military posts were often very high. He wanted to see where this woman had come from and whether she might have any documents on her that could provide us some clues.