Search for the Buried Bomber

CHAPTER 37





Another One Gone



Isquatted down beside him. A faint breeze was blowing out of the air shaft as we shined our flashlights inside. It was utter blackness. Who knew where it led? A strange odor floated up from somewhere far down the shaft. I still remember that scent. It was much lighter than what I'd smelled in the sinkhole, but I could tell it was the same odor. Although I had no idea what it came from, that odor appearing at this moment made me feel uneasy. Had someone used the suit to seal up the opening? Was there a leak in the ventilation system? This blockage had been merely a temporary measure, but now that we'd removed it, would the poison outside begin to leak slowly into the room? As I thought about this I began to feel a little unwell. Ma Zaihai and I piled up a stack of odds and ends and, in a symbolic gesture, used them to block up the air shaft. At least this way we felt somewhat more secure. We sat down, all of us severely dispirited. Such a succession of frights was far too wearing.

In a soft voice, Ma Zaihai asked, "If she didn't leave through here, then how exactly did Engineer Yuan get out?"

Looking at the opening, I shook my head. We'd been deceiving ourselves. Even if Yuan Xile had managed to crawl inside, she was too big to have advanced any farther. So where had she gone? After all, this was a sealed room. Besides the vent, none of the other openings were big enough for even a cockroach to crawl through. As I thought about this, I involuntarily raised my flashlight and shined it once more around the chamber. The chaos of our search had thrown the entire room into a terrific mess. The extent of our alarm could be seen from the complete disorder, but there was still no Yuan Xile. The four of us were all that were left.

As this thought of "the four of us" occurred to me, I felt a sudden mental jolt. Something had changed. This sensation felt very familiar, as if I'd just experienced it. Again I shined my flashlight around the room. For a long time I was puzzled. Then, all of a sudden, I realized what it was: in addition to us three, the fourth person was Chen Luohu. I assumed he'd been curled up in a corner this whole time. As I swept my flashlight across the chamber, I realized that—for who knows how long—I hadn't seen him at all. I stood up. Once more I shined the flashlight around the room. Chen Luohu had vanished as well!

Then I really began to fall apart. My blood pulsed in my veins and I could no longer support my own weight. I was rocked by a burst of dizziness and felt as if my brain was swelling in my skull. I was tottering, hanging on by only a thread. I wanted to slump directly to the floor. Luckily, Ma Zaihai helped steady me. "What is it?" he and the deputy squad leader both asked. Stammering, I managed to get it out. I watched as the color drained from their faces. In an instant Ma Zaihai was sweeping his flashlight around the room and calling out, "Engineer Chen!"

The way our excitation continued to increase made us seem like mere pieces on a chessboard, being manipulated by some unseen, diabolical hand, led little by little toward the point of collapse. Every move was perfect. In the flickering flashlight beam, all of us quickly sank into a state of hysteria. I have already forgotten what we felt in those moments, though dread was certain. Thinking back on it now, however, given that we'd encountered something that went beyond any rational explanation, what was there for us to dread? Was I scared of disappearing myself, or scared of being abandoned here?

We pounded our fists against the walls of the iron chamber and yelled at the top of our lungs. Then we lay down and examined the floorboards. The already messy room became even more chaotic, but all our efforts were futile, and the sturdy, utterly flawless walls only increased our panic. We did this again and again until we were completely exhausted. The deputy squad leader was the first to stop, then the two of us gradually calmed down. Ma Zaihai grabbed at his short hair and sat dejectedly in the chair. I rested my head against the wall, brought it back, then smashed it savagely back down.

Any sense of order had now been lost. Could there really be ghosts in here? No one spoke. We could hear one another breathing heavily. And the atmosphere, well, our minds had all gone blank, so there was no atmosphere to speak of. Time passed little by little. Perhaps it was two hours, perhaps four. No one spoke a word. Now that the agitation had passed, exhaustion surged over us like an ocean tide. There came a long period of semiconsciousness, but I was far from asleep. In all my life I'd never felt weariness like this. As a geological prospector, there'd been numerous times I did not sleep for days, but I was always able to regulate my level of exhaustion. We were all born not long after the beginning of the War of Resistance. Even in childhood, we had to labor under conditions so arduous they would be difficult to imagine. Physical tiredness meant little to us, but this sort of total psychic fatigue was something else entirely.

Slowly, though, my mind did become more placid. I don't know precisely how long it all lasted. I'd imagine that what brought me back was the chill that ran through my body once the cold sweat had dried. Or it could have been the hunger. I took a deep breath, turned off my flashlight, and looked around for a place to sit. How long since I'd last eaten, I wondered, and how long had I already been inside this chamber? Here there was neither night nor day. Everything had been thrown into disorder. In those days, watches were considered home appliances. Given that even the supply of lighters was restricted, you can imagine how much harder it was to acquire a watch. As my senses returned, I began to think deeply, almost as if forced. The details of the entire circumstance were released into my mind with no way for me to stop their advance. I later told Old Cat that it was only at this point that I really began to consider what was going on. You could say that the way I thought about things somehow opened up. I've always felt that the moderate professional success I've achieved since then was catalyzed by this very experience. Though it might seem incomprehensible to many, there were a lot of people like me in those days—simple and naive, our problem-solving methods unfailingly direct. This was probably because our news and information was severely limited. You can ask your parents to relate how simplistic the plots of our movies and model-theater performances were—persons good and bad could be clearly distinguished based solely on what they looked like. Back then we almost never considered issues of too great complexity. It was this immaturity on our parts, this belief that things should be simple, that allowed the Ten-Year Calamity (the Cultural Revolution) to be so destructive.

At first, my mind was filled entirely with scenes of Yuan Xile and Chen Luohu's disappearance, all occurring beneath the swaying beam of a flashlight, until I felt dizzy. Then my mind began to move. Just how had it all happened? There had to be something unusual about this chamber that we were unaware of. In a deep recess thirty-six hundred feet underground, within a strange airtight chamber built into a ruined installation abandoned by the Japanese decades before—in a situation in which it was absolutely impossible to disappear—two very alive people were suddenly nowhere to be seen. Assuming they really were gone, then at some point during the several minutes when our attention slackened and we weren't watching them, something must have occurred. But what?

I tried as hard as I could to recall anything that had felt even the slightest bit amiss. When Yuan Xile disappeared, it had been amid total darkness. All of our attention had been focused on finding a flashlight. We'd ignored any sounds that might have been occurring around us. Yuan Xile could have used that moment to do anything she wanted. When Chen Luohu disappeared, the room had been only half dark, but all of our attention had been focused on the opening to the air shaft. We were completely blind to anything happening behind us. Both times somebody disappeared, all our attention had been concentrated on a single spot. I sighed and a preposterous thought appeared in my mind. Was it possible that in here, as soon as you stopped thinking about someone, they would vanish?

This was truly absurd, but as soon as the thought occurred to me, my whole body suddenly went cold and I realized: I wasn't paying attention to Ma Zaihai and the deputy squad leader! With a start I came back to reality, hurriedly twisting my head around, looking for the two of them. Darkness surrounded me. At some point, their flashlight beams had been extinguished, but I hadn't noticed. A wave of panic rushed over me. I groaned involuntarily. I sank into a state of extreme, irrational fear. I was so scared that my entire body curled in on itself. I was unable to force a single breath into or out of my chest. I made myself scream out, though the barest sounds were all I could manage. There was no response. I truly was the only person left in that pitch-black room. I felt another splitting headache, as if my skull were bursting open. The brief calm I'd experienced disappeared at once. I cried out as loud as I could and switched my flashlight back on.

For the briefest moment, I genuinely believed that I was looking at an utterly empty room. I alone had been abandoned within these hellish ruins, trapped inside a secret pitch-black chamber, poisonous mist just beyond the door, and everyone who was with me had vanished like ghosts. A more awful plight could not be conceived. Had it truly been as bad as all that, I'm afraid I would have promptly gone mad. The difference between novels and socalled reality is that, while novels often go to extremes, in reality people are rarely forced into such desperate straits. As soon as I switched on my flashlight, I saw Ma Zaihai standing before me, having seemingly appeared out of thin air. His face was white as a dead man's and he seemed to be groping around the wall for something. I yelled in fright as soon as I saw him. He immediately shrank back several feet. The beam of a second flashlight shot across the room and swept toward me. It was the deputy squad leader, standing in another corner of the iron chamber and watching us with a perplexed look on his face.

Though I relaxed a little, I was still furious. "What the hell were you doing?" I asked them. "Why did you turn off your flashlights and not say a word?"

Ma Zaihai had gone totally stiff. I had scared him half to death and he was speechless. The deputy squad leader stepped in and explained. He'd realized that when the other two disappeared, the iron chamber had been almost totally dark. He wondered if there wasn't some sort of mechanism that turned on when all the lights were off. So he'd asked the two of us to turn off our flashlights and see what we could find. I'd turned mine off just as he'd said this, so he'd assumed I'd heard.

Seeing that the two of them were still here, I began to calm down. "I thought you two had disappeared as well," I told them. The way their eyes widened said they'd had the same worries. Being regular soldiers, though, they were different from me. They had just taken their feelings, placed them in the back of their minds, and ignored them.

"Did you find anything?" I asked them. Ma Zaihai shook his head.

In this we were deceiving ourselves once more. If we were un able to find anything in the light, then how could anything be found in total darkness? But for a man like the deputy squad leader to have thought of this was still rather impressive. The educational level of engineering corpsmen was far from high. At most they would have received a bit of training in their specialty, and that was it. It's like they used to say about the three treasures of the heroic railway corps: a spade, a pickax, and a worn-out quilted jacket. That's how the special-engineering divisions were back then.

We gathered together and sat down. Each of our faces wore the same serious expression. "Let's not panic," I told them. "From now on, we three will stick close together, so if someone else disappears the rest of us will be sure to know what's going on!" They both nodded. It was gratifying to see our morale rise. The situation hadn't changed a bit—my stomach rumbled its intense hunger, and the problems we faced remained legion—but seeing the two soldiers before me I felt secure.

According to materialistic thought, all these strange things we encountered had to have rational explanations, no matter how far-fetched these rationalizations might be. Admittedly, we did often discover that these seemingly forced interpretations were in fact correct, but right now I feared materialistic explanation would simply no longer suffice. I began wondering what would happen if Yuan Xile and Chen Luohu never reappeared. Assuming we made it out of here alive, how would we explain that? The two of them had vanished like ghosts, and where were they now? Had they disappeared completely, or ended up in some other place?

I raised my head and looked around. Not once had I considered the purpose of the iron chamber itself. Based on how it was furnished, it seemed to be either an alternate command center or some kind of safe room, a temporary refuge when the poison mist rose up from the abyss, but was this really the case? It was unimaginably fantastic what the devils had built here. At the end of an enormous natural grotto, we'd found a massive dam and warplane, their presence basically inexplicable. So, given that the Japanese intent was still unfathomable, was it possible this iron chamber was part of some overarching plan?

I stood up and looked at the four walls around me. Suddenly a question appeared in my mind: What was behind them? Concrete? Or something I couldn't even guess? I ran my fingers along the iron. It was bumpy and rough, as if corroded by some strong acid. Traces of white paint remained, none larger than a fingernail. The wall was ice-cold. As soon as I placed my palm to it, all the heat was sucked from my body. No, I suddenly realized, this was much too cold! The temperature was like that of the underground river, so cold as to be unendurable.

I stuck my ear to the wall. The deputy squad leader and Ma Zaihai stared. "What is it?" Ma Zaihai asked.

I raised my hand to tell him to not make any noise. I had already heard something. At first I couldn't identify it, then a moment later it dawned on me. It was the sound of water, but not the roar of the river crashing against rock. This was a noise I was familiar with. I come from a family of fishermen. It was the dreary swooshing of the underwater current rubbing against the sides of a boat. In my astonishment I listened again, and indeed I was not mistaken, but I knew it was impossible. The iron chamber was above the generator room. I distinctly remembered the water level was many floors beneath our feet. Even if the sluice gates had closed while we were in here, the underground river would never have risen this high. I related my discovery to Ma Zaihai and the deputy squad leader. They were both perplexed, but when they pressed their ears to the wall, they could hear it as well. Smiling bitterly, Ma Zaihai asked, "So what does this mean? Are we underwater now?"

I grabbed the grapnel and struck it forcefully against the iron wall. There was a bang. Sparks flew off the wall. The sound was low and deep, totally unlike the cry emitted by hollow metal. We truly were surrounded by water. I was stunned. Then I realized that beyond this chamber, beyond the water, there was sure to be another gigantic iron wall. The iron chamber was independent from the rest of the dam and wrapped in a huge iron chute. I slapped myself. How had I not thought of this earlier? What part of a dam's interior installation would require a thing like this? It was all too simple. As far as I knew, there was only one device that would necessitate just such an iron shell!