Search for the Buried Bomber

CHAPTER 13





Yuan Xile



You, reader, may feel baffled at this point. In fact, that's just how I felt. If this were a novel it might seem absurd. After all, novels are plotted, with a beginning, middle, and end that are supposed to make sense. But my story is simply a record of the facts. I found Yuan Xile down there. That is a fact. I never would have expected to find her in that cave, but that's where she appeared. At first I couldn't believe it, but taking a closer look, I knew it had to be her. My heart raced with the shock of it. How could she be down here?

Yuan Xile was a prospector herself. Although we were more or less the same age, her qualifications were superior to any of ours. She had studied abroad in the Soviet Union and was given preferential treatment when she returned. She had been second-in-command of several of the prospecting teams I'd served on. She was very serious, and people called her the Soviet Witch. Because of my carelessness, I was regularly made to suffer her criticisms, but in private she was a frank and honest woman and we got along rather well. She had led teams all across the country, so Pei Qing's reason for recognizing her was likely similar to my own.

But there hadn't been any women among the twenty-four of us who'd been stationed at 723. And from the wounds that covered her face and body, it was clear that something terrible had occurred. Her body temperature was extremely low. There was no time for us to discuss why or how she got down here. We cast lots and Wang Sichuan was made to remove her clothes. Most of her body was covered in cuts and scrapes, her skin bruised dark blue from internal bleeding. It was a terrifying thing to see. Her hands and knees were a bloody mess. If it weren't for the stones and iron netting that lay all around us, one would certainly have thought that she'd suffered some cruel torture. None of this was fatal, though. The most serious problem was her body temperature. Her clothes had been soaked even before Wang Sichuan knocked her into the water. Her temperature had likely been low for some time. Her lips were already colored deep purple.

Trembling, Wang Sichuan wiped her body dry and wrapped her in a sleeping bag. He heated water for her to drink, then used the fire to help steam her face, continuing to care for her until the small hours of the night. At last, her temperature began to rise, but she remained unconscious and could not be awoken. Still, our voices lost much of their tension. As Pei Qing stood by her side and watched her sleep peacefully, he spoke his thoughts aloud: "How could she have gotten here?"

Once again I thought of what Old Cat had said to me the night before we set out: "Something about this isn't right." More and more, everything seemed like it was going to hell. "We shouldn't keep going," I said.

"What's wrong?" asked Wang Sichuan.

"It's starting to look like we weren't the first ones here," I said. "There's something going on, and that colonel wasn't honest with us."

My mind was in chaos, my specific thoughts and feelings a mystery to me. Still, it was plain what had taken place here. Pei Qing nodded. I could see his brow begin to wrinkle. The same realization must have just occurred to him: Based on Yuan Xile's attire, it was clear she too had been here on a prospecting assignment. She must have belonged to some unknown fifth group. And this fifth team must have entered the cave some time before us. Had they begun after we did, they'd never have been able to overtake us so quickly. Though the specifics were still unclear, we now knew that prospecting activity had taken place here prior to our arrival. Yuan Xile was the ironclad proof. The situation was a mess. All at once, a host of new problems had arisen. For example: If this group had been here before us, why hadn't the colonel let us know? And given that Yuan Xile was a female prospector, there was no way the higher-ups would have let her explore the cave by herself. So where was everyone else?

The deputy squad leader was sitting in silence some distance away from us, surrounded by his soldiers. I went over and asked him how much of this he'd previously been aware of.

"Even less than you," he said, shaking his head. "We entered the cave when you did, but that meeting you held beforehand, we didn't even get that—just orders to accompany you and complete the mission. Nothing more."

Everyone else was silent.

"Why not just ask her when she wakes up," said Wang Sichuan.

I shook my head. Yuan Xile had just been through hell. The scariest thing about it was that she had been without a flashlight. For who knows how long this poor woman had been wandering lost through the caverns in pitch-black darkness. Imagine what she went through: stumbling through the limitless dark of a freezing cave, strange and nameless sounds echoing off the walls. There was no telling what condition she'd be in when she woke up.

"It's useless," Pei Qing added. "Even if she does wake up, she won't tell us very much. Among those of her level, keeping quiet is a point of professional pride. Since she outranks all of us, it would be against protocol for her to say anything."

"So what do we do now?" asked Wang Sichuan. "Goddamn it, what the hell were our superiors thinking? We've never been involved in a mess like this before. The best thing to do would be to just pull out. Is whatever the hell's down here really worth dying for?"

"You should have realized on the long truck ride over that this assignment would be far different from any we'd worked on previously," Pei Qing said, not looking at Wang Sichuan but past him, in the direction we had to travel. I saw a strange sort of anticipation pass through his eyes.

This guy is not normal, I thought. Looking at his face, you'd think what had happened so far made almost no difference to him. I thought once more of the note, but then my mind turned back to our current situation. Indeed, I too was more than a little curious about what was waiting at the end of the river. And why, I wanted to know, was the truth behind our predicament getting harder and harder to grasp the longer we were down here?

"I say you all should just stop discussing it," said Chen Luohu. "If our brothers on the engineering team hear us talking like this, they'll think we're doubting the decisions of our superiors, and that won't be good at all." He had shrunk to one side, but kept speaking in a quiet voice. "We might as well continue on. There's nothing to do but suck it up and keep going."

Wang Sichuan stared at Chen Luohu, but I stopped him before he could say anything. This time Chen Luohu was correct. The engineering corpsmen thought differently than we did. We should take pains to say little in their presence that might make them think we were having second thoughts. "No matter what," I said after thinking about it for a moment, "we can't go anywhere until she wakes up and we ask her what's going on. Even if we only find out a little, that's better than nothing. At the very least, she should be able to give us some sort of explanation."