by Brian Nelson
Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ.
He would soon enter bardo—the final test. He would need to be at peace when he entered, so that a lama would appear to guide him, so that in his rebirth he might find his Chodren. So he tried to shut out the pain. He tried not to be afraid. He tried to think only of peace.
Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ.
He thought of the happy moments. A boy, playing with his dogs in the snow. Laughing with Chodren in one of their rare moments of solitude, chest to chest, hidden away from the world. The professor and his wonderful food, the night he had playfully tapped Sonam’s leg and said, “I knew it; it’s hollow!” And finally, he thought of the night along the river when he and Hui Ying had shared their secrets, and how she had gently touched his face and smiled.
Zhi-bde. Peace.
He focused all his energy. Calm. Peace. Zhi-bde. Sleep. His beautiful Chodren. Forty-nine days in bardo. Forty-nine days until his rebirth. He must be serene if he hoped to awaken close to her.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Underworld
Tangshan Military Laboratory, China
They were on sublevel forty-four. Hui Ying led the way with the Kalashnikov, then Ryan, and finally Eric and Mei. Here, too, the space was unfinished, filled with construction materials and the smell of pine two-by-fours. But this level went out farther than the others. It appeared that the Chinese had been tunneling out horizontally. The farther they went, the rougher their surroundings became. The tile floor became dusty concrete, and bare drywall gave way to steel and aluminum framing. Massive concrete pillars gave way to a forest of thin metal supports.
Ying guided them to what looked like an exterior wall. They jogged along it for a while under a string of yellow halogen construction lights, until they came to long sheet of silvery plastic with a red-and-yellow sign that seemed to warn, do not enter.
Ying took out a pocketknife and cut a long strip through the plastic, then stepped through.
There, inside, was the oddest thing. A massive slab of black rock. Just to see it, to let light fall on it, felt like an intrusion on its dark slumber. It had clearly lain undisturbed here since the world was young.
Ying unshouldered her backpack and took out four headlamps and handed them out. Eric flicked his on and noticed a small metal door with a padlock—shiny and small against the ancient rock. The door was no more than a foot and a half square and looked as if it had been hastily mounted.
“They stumbled on it when they were extending this level,” Ying said.
“Stumbled on what?” Eric asked.
Instead of answering, she took some bolt cutters and popped off the padlock. Then Ryan opened the tiny door and stuck his head in. “Hmmm. I really hope you fit, Hill.” Eric got down to look. It was a narrow tunnel, no wider than the opening, bored right through the bedrock. He was the biggest of them, and as he knelt down and looked at the long narrow tunnel, he wasn’t sure he would fit.
He leaned back on his heels and looked at Mei. “I’d better go last. That way, if I get stuck, I won’t hold you back.”
Hui Ying gave a quick nod, stuffed the backpack into the tunnel, and crawled in after it. Then Mei, Ryan, and finally Eric. He had to squeeze his shoulders in tight, and his arms were all but useless. He could propel himself only by shifting his knees and feet, and once his feet were all the way in, he got stuck. It was a terrifying moment of claustrophobia before he managed to shift his shoulder and inch forward. The cold, unyielding rock on every side and the millions of tons more that lay above him. Half panicked, he pushed and squirmed, ripping the knees of his pants, feeling the cuts and scrapes, but not caring, just desperate to get out.
After several minutes’ struggle, his left shoulder no longer felt rough stone against it. Then his other shoulder was free, and he scrambled out, breathing fast and heavy. He stood in a small chamber with a cobblestone floor. In the center was a round pit like an old well. He looked over the lip and saw an open shaft with metal handrails drilled into the rock. Hui and Mei were already halfway down, their headlamp beams dancing around the circular walls.
“Watch your grip,” Ryan said. “The rungs are at least seventy years old and rusty.”
As if on cue, they heard Mei cry out, “Ouch!”
Ryan went next, and Eric followed him into the darkness.
* * *
Soon they all were standing together in a tunnel with an arched ceiling. Between Eric’s feet were the remnants of a narrow-gauge railroad track. On the ceiling, he could see old light fixtures, like upside-down woks, strung together with frayed cloth-insulated wires.
The tunnel appeared to go on forever in both directions, a fact reinforced when Eric opened his mouth and his words seemed to run off endlessly down the long passages.
“What is this place?”
Ying’s reply came in a whisper: “It was built by the Germans in the 1920s, when they controlled Tangshan. It was used to connect the forts and bunkers that protected the city. After the Japanese took over in the late thirties, they must have expanded it. No one knew that the tunnels reached this far into the city until some workers discovered this shaft last month.” She motioned upward. “Come on—no time to talk now.”
She led them down one of the passages at a cautious jog. Debris was strewn everywhere: railroad ties, ammunition boxes, fallen rock, and, occasionally, rusted World War II–era bicycles, which the soldiers must have used to move quickly through the tunnels. It was damp and misty. A layer of fog rose up to their knees and came aglow whenever their headlamp beams passed over it. Occasionally, the tunnel split or intersected with another, and here there were signs on the walls—most in Japanese, but a few in German—giving directions or marking distance.
The tightness of the tunnel and the way it conducted sound was unnerving. Everything echoed: their jogging footsteps, the clatter of a kicked rock, even their panting breath. Now and then, one of them would stop and shush the others. Then they would hurriedly extinguish their lights and wait, listening as hard as they could in the darkness, trying to soften their panting and the pounding of their hearts. Eric would stand with the pistol he had taken from the guard, and Ying with her rifle. Waiting. Trembling. Only when the silence was certain would they lower their weapons and move on.
Ying had tasked Eric with protecting Mei, and he realized it was a blessing. Focusing on her meant he had less time to be afraid for himself.
After they had jogged for a half hour—over two kilometers, according to the markers—they began to hear a sound like a light wind through trees. It grew steadily louder and louder until they all recognized it: water.
Soon they stood on a bridge with a river flowing under them.
From then on, they followed the river. Sometimes on their left, sometimes on their right. While the river snaked through the rock, the tunnel and rail line ran true, crossing over the river again and again. Now and then a wall would fall away and the river would be there again. Eric found it reassuring. The river knew the way out.
At a diamond intersection, Ying paused and studied the signs, wiping rust from one of the markers; then she motioned toward the left passage. “If we go that way for a half mile, we’ll be under Longze Road.”
“Thank God,” Eric said, “I’ve had enough of this place.”
But she shook her head. “We can’t go that way.”
“Why not?”
“If Meng suspects we are in the tunnels, that’s where he’ll be waiting for us. We have to go another way—a way he doesn’t know.”
So they pushed on. Another hour passed, and still no sign of pursuit. They were beginning to feel that they could make it.
Just as the endless tunnels were beginning to make them claustrophobic, the beams of their headlamps suddenly leaped outward in every direction, like searchlights in the night. They strained to see the ceiling but couldn’t. The tips of the lowest stal
actites were two hundred feet up, while the true ceiling was lost in the shadows of the massive cones that hung like inverted cathedral spires.
The sudden beauty was astounding, the colors otherworldly: turquoise, emerald, garish red, and white, white, white. Many of the formations were huge, dripping columns of calcified white, built up in defined layers, like enormous wedding cakes. Another wall was a massive row of thin cylinders that reminded him of the pipes of a cathedral organ. Another was like a huge frozen waterfall of flowstone, a hundred feet high. Eric felt as if he were inside a body, amid the connective tissue and fibrous membranes that held the world’s organs in place.
They passed over natural bridges, under stone arches, and along deep pits that dropped away in impenetrable darkness.
It was then that Eric’s headlamp beam picked up something else, hanging from the ceiling in thick black bushels. Thousands upon thousands of them, chittering and squeaking like mice.
“Look,” he said.
Mei clutched at her mother when she realized what they were.
“Don’t be afraid,” Eric said. “They won’t bother us. Besides, it’s a good sign. It means there must be an opening close by.”
“We still have a long way to go,” Ying said, “and we are going out a very different way than they are.”
“What does that mean?” Eric asked.
“I don’t want to spoil the surprise.” It was the closest thing to playfulness Eric had heard from her all day.
* * *
“They’re at the West Gate now, General,” the lieutenant said.
Meng nodded. That meant the vice president’s motorcade would be here in less than ten minutes. He straightened his uniform and checked his cuffs. The wound in his shoulder was still bleeding, but he had refused the doctor’s advice to put it in a sling. He would not meet the vice president so visibly wounded.
It was going to be enough of a humiliating experience already. Meng knew that the next few hours were critical. If he handled it just right, he might survive. A quick resolution—capture of the traitors combined with the continued success of the project—would mean forgiveness. A second chance in a system where second chances were exceedingly rare.
Truth be told, he was beginning to breathe a little easier. The body of the Tibetan had been found, and he appeared to be the only saboteur. They had also managed to put out the fire, and much of the sabotage had already been fixed: the cell phone boosters were working again, which meant that his communication network was intact. While a large section of the Great Lab had been destroyed, there were other facilities around the base. Within a few hours, they hoped to send some of the employees back to work.
Most importantly, the chip-tracking program was up and running. He could see Hui and the Americans now on his iSheet. Somehow, they had gotten off base. He didn’t know how, but it didn’t matter. Captain Xi had sent four squads to hunt them down. It wouldn’t take long now.
He took in the scene before him: It was a beautiful spring day, but the lawn in front of him was filled with thousands of battered and confused employees. A dozen ambulances with flashing blue lights sat clustered around the main entrance, paramedics in blue uniforms tending to those with minor injuries. The seriously injured had already been taken to the infirmary or to the city hospitals.
He spotted the motorcade, almost a kilometer away, wending its way past the School of Infantry.
“My General!”
Meng turned to see Captain Xi rushing toward him, waving an iSheet in one hand. “Sir, we have them!”
“Where?”
“Here!” He showed Meng a map and pointed with his finger. “Our men will catch up with them in a matter of minutes. It appears to be the water treatment plant.”
“You fool!” He grabbed the iSheet and crumpled it in his hands. “I should have known it was too easy. Jiàn guǐ!” he cursed. “Search the base! I want everyone looking for them. I don’t care if it’s a colonel or a secretary; everyone joins in.”
He spat. They could be anywhere by now. It suddenly felt hopeless.
Then a fresh idea came into his mind. “Wait!” Perhaps it was not so complicated after all. Every lie had its seed of truth, didn’t it?
He spread out the crumpled iSheet and began to work the screen. A few touches, and he had what he wanted: a map of the complex that showed a string of four lines. It was the tracking program, modified to show just the twins and the Americans, tracing their paths for the past six hours. He could see where the twins’ chips had diverged in the Great Lab at 8:43 this morning, just before the explosion.
He squinted at the screen. “What does this mean?” he asked Captain Xi.
The man looked at the readout and, with a few touches, changed the view from overhead to horizontal. Then Meng understood. Hui Ying and the Americans had not gone up the staircase with the others. They had gone down, to level sixty-four. That was where the chips left the building through the plumbing pipes.
Why did you go down when everyone else went up? You couldn’t get out that way … He zoomed in on the spot where the three chips must have entered the sewer. He saw another tracking tag there. Who is this? He followed the chip’s path up to the new drilling on level forty-four. But they couldn’t get out that way …
“The old tunnel system!” he exclaimed. He looked at his watch, calculating how much of a head start they had. There was still time.
“Get to the Longze Road entrance as fast as you can.”
“Yes sir.” The captain snapped to attention and turned on his heel.
* * *
They found the dead men at the edge of the great cavern, inside a long drape of ancient stone that folded and bent like an undulating curtain.
The space felt hallowed, like a sealed crypt, and just to look on the bodies left them with the feeling that they were trespassing.
There were twenty-one of them, spaced in four neat rows of five, with one man at the front of the formation. The uniformity was striking. Each man had died on his knees, shirtless, his legs wrapped in a girdle or skirt. In front of each man was a small wooden block with a knife on it.
The lone body at the front of the formation appeared to be the leader. He was the only one whose head was still attached to his body. It was he who had decapitated each of his own men, one by one, after they ritually disemboweled themselves. Then he must have meticulously cleaned each knife and returned it to the block. Finally, when every man had died preserving his honor, the commander had assumed his spot at the head of the column and disemboweled himself.
It was a moment of history frozen in time. August 1945. Japan surrenders after Hiroshima and then Nagasaki are bombed. A final cadre of Japanese soldiers who had decided not to return home (or were unable). So instead of letting themselves be taken by the Chinese—to be humiliated, starved, and tortured—they had come here, to this forgotten cave. To die with honor, like true Bushido warriors.
Eric walked among the bodies. Some had ribs protruding through leathery, mummified skin. Others were only skeletons. Beside some of the bodies were odd artifacts: poetry, letters, and stained photographs. Most of the photos were black and indiscernible, but one, set on its edge, had the black and white image of a smiling woman with a little girl in her arms.
“Come on,” Ying called. “No time for sightseeing.”
Eric nodded and followed them down the winding path. But the sight of the dead soldiers had left him feeling strange. There was a sense of tragedy about them, yet his sympathy did not run deep. World War II was the darkest time in human history, when the most inhuman atrocities were inflicted on the weak and defenseless. Among all those countless horrors, many of the most grotesque had been committed by the Japanese against the Chinese.
Yet there was something about the dead men’s resolve that resonated with him. They had decided to die rather than be taken by the enemy. After hi
s captivity, it was a sentiment he understood.
They pushed on for another kilometer and then another. It felt as if they had been jogging all day. They were tired, thirsty, and hungry. Eric’s muscles ached and his lungs burned, sick of the damp air. He put his hand on his chest. Would this tunnel ever end?
It was at that very moment that Ryan stopped them: “Hear that?”
They all quickly extinguished their lamps and stood as motionless as possible, trying to calm their hearts, trying to listen, straining to hear over the rush of the river.
It was only then, with the sudden return of his fear, that Eric realized how safe he had begun to feel. He had come to believe that they really had made their escape.
He was just about to tell them it was nothing, when they heard the unmistakable clatter of a kicked rock, followed by the clapping of boots on stone. Eric tried to swallow, but his mouth was too dry.
“How?” Ryan said. “It’s not possible.”
Mei began to whimper with fear. “No, Māmā, please.”
“Come on!” Ying said. “We can still make it!”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Losing Control
Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC
Bill Eastman couldn’t sleep. In the middle of the night, he had awoken with the overpowering feeling that something was very wrong. The feeling had been growing inside him for months now, as his control over the replication project—his project—slipped from his grasp.
Outside his bedroom window, a storm was brewing. On the ceiling, he watched the shadows of tree branches as they were buffeted and twisted by the wind outside. How had he gotten here? How had he lost control?
He had given Curtiss the most versatile tool ever created, a tool that could revolutionize the entire military arsenal of the United States. Of course, everyone wanted a piece of it. The navy, army, air force, CIA, NSA, DARPA—they had descended on the lab and were using his masterpiece to go off in a thousand different directions. And he, Bill Eastman, the man who made it all possible, had no control over any of it.