Search for the Buried Bomber

CHAPTER 40





The Freezer



It was probably the layer of cold mist that made the open space beyond the chamber seem so large. Shivering, Wang Sichuan and I walked back along the elevated iron-grate walkway. Soon the door to the second iron chamber had vanished. This was Wang Sichuan's first time outside. All his attention was quickly drawn to the black shapes frozen in the pools. He kept stopping and shining his flashlight on them, hoping to discover what was inside. The ice was far from transparent, and thick clouds of mist blocked our view. At last he gave up.

I looked around as I walked, scanning my surroundings in much greater detail than I had before. What had the Japanese used this place for? I wondered. The temperature was surely lower than that of the underground river. To keep it this cold, there had to be a compression engine somewhere around here. Back then refrigeration compressors were used only in walk-in freezers. Indeed, this place resembled nothing so much as a freezer for fish or some other aquatic product.

After we'd reached a certain point, Wang Sichuan suggested we walk along one of the concrete ridges that ran through the pools. It appeared to continue far into the depths of the mist. Though it was so narrow that maintaining one's balance would be difficult, it was better than just walking across the ice. I agreed. Swaying as if we were on a tightrope, we made our way into the mist. As we left the regular iron-grate walkway I felt a twinge of timidity. It had been like a lifeline to us. The trek on the cement ridge was endless. Perhaps it was the severe cold or perhaps we were overcautious, but either way our progress was slow. Shaking from the cold and surrounded by a dense mist, neither of us had anything to say. By the end of it, I felt as if I were in a trance.

At last Wang Sichuan stopped. He called out from behind me. A line of large shadows, each about half as tall as a man, had appeared up ahead. Increasing our pace, a moment later we reached the edge of the open space. The shadows were a row of cryptic machines arrayed along the wall, their exteriors covered in icy frost. From them emerged a riot of pipes that snaked over to the concrete pools and plunged into the ice. Numerous placards were hung just overhead. Wang Sichuan knocked the frost off a few. They were serial numbers, with something like "Cold-03-A" written on each, all of them arranged in a specific order. The serial numbers on the pipes were much more complex, seeming to indicate that they were responsible for keeping the pools cold. These, I guessed, were the refrigeration compressors. The temperature dropped severely as we walked alongside them. My teeth began to chatter.

We soon came upon a huge doorway—approximately fifteen feet wide—cut into the concrete wall. The door itself was covered in frost and outfitted with a torque-operated door bar. Partially open, its iron body was astonishingly thick. Wang Sichuan kicked it several times, but it remained absolutely still. Something about it felt very familiar, as if I'd seen it before, though I couldn't recall where. It wasn't until Wang Sichuan snapped off several chunks of ice, revealing the characters written underneath, that I finally remembered. Written on the door, in very large script, was "Plan 53." It was nearly identical to the huge iron door we'd dug up from beneath the rock on the first part of the underground river. Could the space behind this door also be filled with explosive charges? It didn't seem too likely. The door was cracked open just wide enough to admit a single person. The hinges were frozen solid and the thing wouldn't budge.

I took a deep breath. Then Wang Sichuan and I filed in one after the other. The temperature inside was slightly warmer, and consequently the mist was especially thick, but after we took a few steps it began to disperse. We stared wide-eyed. Behind the door was an ironwork tunnel, very tall and as wide as the doorway. It seemed to be a passageway for transporting large-scale equipment. We walked farther in. The smell of rusted iron became stronger and stronger, the ground beneath our feet increasingly rough and uneven. Ahead of us was only darkness. I was hesitating about whether to continue on when Wang Sichuan tapped me on the shoulder. He pointed at the wall. It was covered in scales of bubbling rust. A long section had been rubbed off by someone's hand, and where the rust had spread to the floor, we distinctly saw footprints. Two pairs of them.

These marks had been made only recently. My spirits rose at once. It seemed we had located Yuan Xile's trail. Following the markings, we quickened our pace. Soon we were running down the pitch-black passageway, shining our flashlights all around us. In the time it takes to smoke half a cigarette we were out, only to find ourselves atop a high platform. The area below was vast and open, the ceiling tall and hung with steel crossbeams. As we shined our flashlights down, an astonishing scene appeared before us. Down below was a gigantic factory. Two huge iron rails ran along its floor like a pair of giant scars. A set of iron stairs led down from the platform. A few moments later, we were on the factory floor. From this vantage, the room looked even more vast. Various machines were strewn all about. Old, dust-covered tarpaulins covered pile after pile of things unseen. A hook used for heavy lifting hung from overhead, its twenty years of disuse not immediately obvious. At the very least, the room didn't smell of rusted iron. A ventilation unit identical to that of the caisson ran along the baseboard. It must have remained in operation these past twenty years, for the air here was relatively clean and dry. We switched on our flashlights, though we didn't know what we were searching for. Few of the structures the Japanese left behind in the Northeast had been kept in such perfect condition. The vast majority had been destroyed prior to their departure. Had the Japanese really left in such a hurry?

I soon found myself standing before a long partition. At first glance, the mass of papers pasted across it looked similar to the posters proclaiming new production records during the Great Leap Forward. Looking closer, I discovered they were actually schedules, all of them written in Japanese, along with a series of structural blueprints I didn't understand. The blueprints were stained with mildew and had already turned soft and yellow. The moment I touched one, a whole stretch of them dropped to the floor. I dared not touch anything else. Shining my flashlight before me, I watched as war propaganda posters and black-and-white photos appeared now and again in the circular beam.

"This has to be where the Japs assembled the Shinzan," I said to Wang Sichuan. It had been broken down into its smallest components prior to being transported here. The job of reassembling it probably continued over the course of several months. Here the components would have been maintained and repaired if necessary, oiled, and then reassembled into larger parts.

"In that case," said Wang Sichuan, "moving this stuff out of here would definitely require some kind of gigantic freight elevator. We'd better look around for it. Maybe that's the way out."

We scanned our surroundings as we walked. Something on the wall caught my attention. Hanging there was a wooden board with black-and-white photos of all sizes pasted over every inch. Some were group shots, some just of one person. All of those photographed were wearing the kind of Japanese military uniforms you see on TV, disgraceful smiles on their faces. These had probably been shot during some holiday here. There was one photo that particularly drew my interest: Several Chinese workers, so thin their bones looked like firewood, were dragging some object out of the water. It was still half submerged and utterly black, like a mass of jellyfish. A Japanese soldier stood watching them. I couldn't tell what the thing was. The photo was too blurry. I was about to call Wang Sichuan over when I realized he was already yelling my name. He'd walked some distance away and was standing by one of the tarps. I hurried over just as he yanked the cover half off. There, beneath the tarp, was a deathly pale human hand.

Wang Sichuan pulled the tarp all the way off. Amid the cinder blocks and steel bars was a corpse, dressed in the uniform of the engineering corps. The body was squeezed into a pile of steel bars. We pulled it out. It was hard as a rock, probably due to the cold. This person had been dead for some time. We turned him over. The face was unfamiliar to us, its expression panic-stricken. His eyes were opened so wide they bulged in their sockets. He was a young man, but I couldn't tell whether he'd been among the four groups who entered with us. Considering how long he'd been dead, he'd probably been part of Yuan Xile's team. Counting him, we'd now come across three of its members: two were dead and one was crazy. Where was everyone else?

Knowing yet another person had died disturbed me, especially because this soldier was so young. I have always believed that making mere kids risk their lives like this—all before they have truly begun to enjoy life's pleasures—is just too unfair. Wang Sichuan was far from overly sentimental. He and other Mongolians possess a rather philosophical view regarding the passage of life. Though he would always claim to be a materialist, I firmly believe that inside he remained a purebred Mongolian, believing that to die is to be summoned by Tengri to return to the gray wolves, the white deer, and the grasslands. There is certainly nothing wrong with this kind of detachment, but I always used to say that the more detached a person is from death, the more cold-blooded he becomes. Your Genghis Khan was no softie, I would tell him. Perhaps in his heart he believed he was merely sending his foes back to heaven. Wang Sichuan refuted me at once. Qin Shihuang, the first Chinese emperor, showed no detachment when thinking about his own death, he said. That a person so scared of dying could nonetheless kill people like flies makes your argument just silly. Even the tiniest bit of detachment would be better than that.

A solid layer of blood covered almost half the body. This seemed unusual to Wang Sichuan, so we undid the corpse's stiff clothing. There were two bloody holes in his back, each as thick as a thumb. The skin around them was all flared up. As military men, we were all too familiar with injuries like these—they were bullet wounds.

Even Wang Sichuan's dark skin turned white. This made no sense. Had it been some sort of accidental death, we could have accepted it. Exploring an environment as complex and dangerous as this would make accidental deaths difficult to avoid, especially for wet-behind-the-ears new recruits. Murder changed the matter completely. Bullet holes meant someone had fired a gun, and that they had had a reason for doing so. Who would take a gun and murder his own comrade? Had the Japanese done this? It didn't seem too likely, but they'd been gone only twenty years. Supposing that the trainee-level reinforcements were stationed here in their teens, by the time we arrived they'd only be in their thirties. Still, this place hardly seemed habitable, and we had yet to see a single sign of life. In which case, could there really be an enemy spy among us?

My mind spun. Wang Sichuan abruptly began to stuff the corpse back in among the steel bars.

"What are you doing?" I asked him.

He said that by murdering someone the spy had revealed his existence. So he'd hidden the body beneath the tarp, hoping to keep anyone else from discovering it. We'd surely be next on his list if he found out we were on to him. Against his gun we were dead meat. We had no choice but to cover the body back up.

"This way," said Wang Sichuan, "he'll have no idea that we know what's going on and we can grab him when he's not paying attention."

After struggling for a bit, we managed to return the body to its original position. "We have to be much more careful now," said Wang Sichuan.

I nodded. My mind was in a flurry. I'm used to high-tension situations, but the sensation I had was very different from the nervousness I might feel when confronting some natural obstacle. The two of us sighed, turned around, and prepared to continue on. At once I was aware that something wasn't right. I shined my flashlight before me. Yelling out in fright, I stumbled backward to the floor. There was a man stretched out on the ground, his ghastly face craning up toward us. He stared at us with fixed eyes.

Yuan Xile had already given me this very sort of scare, but that didn't mean I was immune to it. This man had crawled up, practically right behind our backs, without making the slightest noise. Now he was flat on the ground, staring wide-eyed like some strange beast. Wang Sichuan and I both leaped in fright. I fell to the floor, my lower back knocking against the steel bars. The pain was so great it nearly knocked the wind out of me. Regaining myself, I hurriedly swept my flashlight before me. The moment I spotted him, he dodged out of the beam. Suddenly he was up on all fours. With lightning speed he scrambled into the dark recesses of the factory, his movements no different from an animal's.

"Grab him!" I yelled. By the time I stood up it would already be too late.

But Wang Sichuan had his own methods. "Shine the light on him!" he said. I swung the flashlight beam after the fleeing man. Wang Sichuan weighed the tube of his flashlight in his hand, then launched it at him.

I watched as the flashlight cut a magnificent arc, then smashed viciously down on the man's knee just as he was about to disappear into the darkness. He let out a muffled groan and toppled over. He tried to get up, but the moment he righted himself he fell back down. This was the first time I'd actually seen Wang Sichuan's skill with the bulu. While muddling along near the Chinese-Mongolian border, I'd heard miraculous descriptions of Mongolians throwing the bulu, but I never would have expected that, when truly used "on the hunt," the movement could actually be so beautiful. Wang Sichuan later told me this throwing style was known as the jirugen bulu. Had he wanted to throw hard, no way would I have been able to make out the flashlight's trajectory. I would have heard only the sound of it smashing down, but the man's knee would have shattered. Truly the best-looking bulu style, he said, was that used for knocking birds out of the sky. One of his anda (his sworn brothers) was a real ace, far more formidable than he.

By the time we ran over, the man was back on all fours. Limping, he thrust himself through a sheet of tarpaulin concealing some back area. Inside, tarp-covered piles of supplies extended in endless rows. In an instant, he was gone. Wang Sichuan and I continued after him. Many of the tarps were covered in taut rope netting secured to the floor on either end, making it easy to trip. Wang Sichuan charged forward, tearing apart the piles. Beneath the tarps were canned goods and devices like corrugated sheets—seemingly a kind of filtration net—as well as a number of fuel tanks. The supplies were stacked in shallow, German-made frames, draped with a tarp and then tightly bound with a length of hemp rope or iron wire. These were packages for airdrops.

We were soon deep inside the dark warehouse. Nothing but close rows of supplies as far as the eye could see, the area vast and filled with shifting shadows, no different from a maze. This is bad, I thought. Wang Sichuan suddenly motioned for silence. His flashlight was on a tarp to our left, a section of which bulged and quivered. We tiptoed over and I leaned in close. Taking a deep breath, Wang Sichuan pulled off the tarp. A plume of dust was blown into the air. Out leaped a white shape, knocking me to the ground. There was so much dust my eyes wouldn't open. I coughed violently, unable to see a thing. I heard Wang Sichuan curse once and then give chase.

I swore to myself and waved away the dust. The two of them were gone. "Wang Sichuan!" I yelled. I was about to go after them when I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. At first I wasn't sure what it was, but after I brushed off the dust and pulled the tarp away, my eyes went wide. Underneath was a military sand table, complete with a crushed wooden model of the dam and a miniature Shinzan surrounded by cranes, mounts, and a number of tiny devices. It was all there.

I'm not sure if the readers have ever heard of a sand table before. Sand tables are small-scale models of terrain made using sediment, toy soldiers, and other materials. This one was probably used to simulate the final phase of the plane's assembly on the underground river. Putting together a bomber as large as this in an underground void would naturally be much more complex than building one in a factory. This sand table was the consummate combination of the meticulous and the crude. The topographical base was slapped together with dowels and other pieces of wood seemingly carved on a whim, acceptable as long as they had the general shape. The pieces that decorated this rough landscape, though, were truly astonishing. I don't remember all the structures, but what made the deepest impression on me was that already-broken dam, and the Shinzan behind it.

The sand table gave an approximate idea of the size and shape of the underground river. It had become astonishingly wide. Around the river were the variously sized shapes of a command station, a bunker, a crane, and a small railway. All the underwater obstacles on the waywere distinctly marked. I could even see the area where Wang Sichuan said his way had been blocked by a pool of quicksand. The sand table showed that, using a great quantity of steel bars and concrete, the Japanese had built a foundational structure beneath the water and atop that erected a huge platform, supported on stilts. Beneath the platform was a filtration canal, allowing them to monitor the content of the underground river water. The most surprising structure on top of the platform was an elevated threerail track, with a long slope up into the void, like a three-tubed antiaircraft gun aimed at some target in the emptiness. Beneath the track was a triangular structure that resembled an upside-down high-voltage tower. The Shinzan was stopped at the end of the track, positioned at the very tip of the three rails—the very tip of the gun, in other words. Just over half its length rose above the dam. Chills ran down my spine. I had thought as much this whole time, but only now did I know for sure: the Japs had wanted to fly the goddamn Shinzan into the void!

By World War II, the Japanese already had considerable experience flying planes from aircraft carriers. Although I myself didn't understand the mechanics of it, it was obvious they had believed it possible for the Shinzan to take off from here. As I thought of the Shinzan's wreckage sunk beneath the water, my mind filled with questions. Given everything the Japanese did here, had the Shinzan ultimately taken off or not? And why had so many buffer bags been piled underwater? And where was that three-track railway?

A bolt of lightning flashed through my mind. I felt a chill spread from my neck all the way down to my heels. Remembering the shape of the plane's wreckage, I distinctly recalled that the Shinzan's front end had been facing away from the dam. Not only had it taken off, it had already flown back out of the abyss!