Search for the Buried Bomber

CHAPTER 23





The Unknown Team



Wang Sichuan and I stared at one another. I looked over at Pei Qing. He and Old Tang were doing the same thing. I had deeply hoped that at least one of us would not be wearing a look of inexpressible terror, but even the eternally unflappable Old Cat had turned deathly pale.

The phone continued to ring, though the sound soon changed to a low rattle, almost like a belch. The decrepit bell clapper must have split off . There was a young soldier standing beside the telephone. He had no idea what to do. As he looked over at us, his hand began to tremble—his conditioned reflex to grab the phone from the receiver. It continued to ring for a long time. None of us did anything, just stood there stock-still, deadlocked. We remained frozen until the phone stopped ringing. Though even then we didn't know whether the call had finally stopped or if the phone had simply broken. Still, once that strange, rattling noise was gone, we immediately relaxed.

Again we looked back and forth from one man to another. We couldn't pretend this had never happened, but what was there to do now? We prepared to leave. A few soldiers walked over to the phone. Old Tang turned back and called to one of them, "Little Zhao, weren't you a communications soldier? Well, go on then. Take a look at the phone."

The young soldier nodded, but as he was about to pick it up— brring!—the phone suddenly began to ring again. We jumped in fright. Old Tang whipped around, instantly set his feet in horse stance, and fluidly pulled his gun. Many soldiers who'd studied martial arts were like this. I'd seen monk soldiers—able fighters and rather skilled with a gun—but as soon they were frightened, they reflexively shifted into a martial-arts pose. Their feet hit the ground and they'd be in horse stance, but with their gun raised out. It never failed to amuse me.

No one was about to laugh now. We were frozen once more, staring stiffly at the telephone. Then Wang Sichuan yelled, "Who are you scared of?" strode over, and grabbed the phone from the receiver. "Hello!" In the black depths of that crack in the earth, within the ruins of a secret installation abandoned by the Japanese, hearing an ancient telephone suddenly ring—and then Wang Sichuan marches over and takes the call? Our hearts were going to beat out of our chests.

Wang Sichuan went silent. The sound that came in response was utterly inhuman. We all heard it: a series of quick bursts of static electricity and a host of indescribable noises, as if someone were coughing very, very rapidly. One after another we each picked up the phone and listened. We had no idea what it might be, but we knew it had to mean something. There was a definite pattern amid the noise.

Now, reader, I know what you're thinking: Morse code. We all jump to this conclusion because all those foreign adventure movies and novels overstate the frequency with which that simple telegraphic code is used. To be sure, explorers from other countries have and still do employ Morse code as a way to increase their chance of survival, but for us that was an impossibility. Morse code uses the Roman alphabet, and in the China of that era, Russian was the language to learn, from the first day of school all the way through graduation. It wasn't until the late 1950s that ChineseSoviet relations soured and English became the required foreign language. We only began to learn some elementary English in the reeducation classes we took at the workers' university once the Cultural Revolution was over. So even if it had been Morse code, none of us would have been able to understand it—we didn't even know the ABCs.

The noise continued for another forty-five seconds before disappearing again. Wang Sichuan then hung up the phone, though the rest of us remained circled around it, waiting for it to ring again. For the next two hours, it made not a sound.

Old Tang ordered all corpsmen in the vicinity to check the phone line. He then asked Little Zhao, the former communications soldier, just what the hell was going on. Little Zhao explained that hand-crank telephones are in fact a sort of generator and can receive (and send) two kinds of calls: from another telephone or from a routing room. Just crank the lever and the other end of the line will start to ring. Because this phone had just done so, there could only be one explanation: the telephone wire still had power. The indistinct sound we heard was most likely the result of a disjunction between a dry cell that was out of power and a telephone wire that wasn't. These wires can last for a very long time, but the dry cell was certainly already ruined. And since this sort of telephone can communicate across a relatively large distance, it would be very difficult to estimate where the call was coming from.

The group of soldiers Old Tang had sent to follow the telephone line tracked it for about one hundred feet, only to find that after joining up with the giant power cable, it too extended deep into the sinkhole. This gave Old Tang the basis for a materialistic explanation. The power cable and the telephone wire, he said, had undoubtedly begun to affect one another. When we got here, he'd sent a couple guys to check on the generator. While fiddling with it, they must have somehow enlarged the electrical current, which then penetrated the insulation of the telephone wire and caused the phone to ring. As for the patterned regularity of the noise, it was probably just the sound of static electricity running through the circuit. This felt like a sensible explanation. Wiping the sweat from our faces, we were so relieved we nearly congratulated one another.

Only Pei Qing refused to accept it. Continuing to stare at the phone, he shook his head at Old Tang, his face unfathomable. Old Tang asked Pei Qing what was the matter. Pei Qing looked at us for a moment, then, taking the phone in hand, he began to cautiously rotate the crank, gradually gaining confidence and quickening his pace. Somehow, the call went through! Placing the phone against his ear, he looked at us, brought a finger to his lips, and motioned for silence.

Describing the event later, we would all say this call had been placed straight to hell. The call continued soundlessly for around ten seconds, and I thanked God for not giving us any further scares. Then, once more, the phone released that indescribable noise.

Pei Qing listened for a moment, then brought the phone up so we could hear: that continuous high-frequency cough, no different than before. "Have you ever seen The Eternal Wave1?" he asked.





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1Released in 1958, The Eternal Wave is a classic Chinese movie about Communist revolutionaries secretly operating an anti-Kuomintang broadcasting station—sending messages in Chinese telegraphic code—in 1939 Shanghai. It should be noted that Chinese telegraphic code, while sounding similar to Morse code, uses an entirely different system for encoding messages.