Search for the Buried Bomber

CHAPTER 43





Japanese Soldiers



The three of us froze. Up till then I'd been in a state of slight disbelief. Could the Japanese uniform I glimpsed have been no more than an illusion? How sure could I be about what I saw while I was being kicked from a ledge? Never would I have expected that, before long, I would actually see this many Japanese soldiers. It was like we'd passed through a tunnel in time: seeing those vile yellow uniforms made me feel as if we'd been transported back to the War of Resistance. But something wasn't right. Why did all these soldiers look so familiar? I looked again, and then I saw it. The Japanese officer raising his head was Old Cat!

As I stood there in shock, Pei Qing and Wang Sichuan walked over to greet us. Wang Sichuan circled around me, looking at the broken bits of ice coating my clothing. "What happened to him?" he asked the deputy squad leader. I was picked up and set down by the fire, my clothes removed. The fire was really something—huge and warm—and I began to tear up, though I had no idea why.

We were still clothed in rags, but Old Cat and the rest were all wearing neat and tidy Japanese military garb. The best was Old Cat in his dark-colored officer's uniform. With his inscrutable expression, it made him look just like a Japanese staff officer from the movies. After being wrapped in a sleeping bag, I found myself sitting directly across from him. At last both of us laughed. And with that, everyone around us began to laugh as well.

"What the hell is going on?" I asked them. "What are you helping those bastards for? At what point did you defect and become Japanese devils?"

"Don't wrong the innocent," said Pei Qing. "We're undercover behind enemy lines." We all cracked up again.

Pei Qing said the route they took was just too damn cold, though he still didn't know why. They'd discovered these uniforms in a storage area. At first no one dared wear them, but after the cold became unbearable, they all put them on. It was a complete set, meant for one of the Japanese brigades stationed in northeastern China. They too had laughed as they looked at one another.

Remembering the point where we'd split up, I asked how they'd gotten here. Had they ever located the source of the telegram? Several of their faces fell. Pei Qing sighed, nodded his head, and said they'd found it, but the people were already dead. He gestured wearily as he said this, then gave a basic retelling of what had happened.

Here I must once more put my memories in order. Pei Qing and the others gave us no more than a sketchy narration of their experiences. With all the years that have passed since then, I seem to have already forgotten many of the particulars. Or perhaps it was Pei Qing's story that wasn't especially detailed. In any case, those parts aren't important.

Following the power cable, they'd floated down the waterway. They called it "River 6," the name given to it by the Japanese. It turned out to be a tributary of "River 0," the main river, the one that flows into the dam. They'd drifted deeper and deeper into the cave. It was just as Old Tang had surmised: the power cables and underwater rails signified that the region had been a densely builtup, high-activity area. The terrain became smoother and flatter the farther they advanced. Not a single obstacle presented itself, and the signs of Japanese activity became increasingly numerous and varied. After they'd been drifting for about forty minutes, the river bottom began to trend upward. The water level became shallower and shallower. Before long a number of shoals appeared. The shoals increased in number, until at last they ran together as a continuous expanse. At first there was still some water atop the shoal and they'd had to wade, but soon the river came to a stop, replaced by a great rocky beach. At this beach River 6 began to branch off into smaller tributaries running back into the cavernous depths.

They marched up the rock beach. They could see a huge cavern up ahead. It was quite flat, though thrown into complete disorder. Stacks of supplies protected by water-resistant canvas sheets covered the cave floor. They lifted off the covers. There were loads of writing desks and correspondence equipment. All manner of power cables hung from the stalactites. Cables thick and thin snaked across the ground, the ceiling, and every place in between. There were also temporary beds and wooden trunks filled with supplies. It was from these that they'd taken their Japanese military uniforms.

At the end of the limestone cave were a number of branching paths, some piled with supplies, some so deep you couldn't see the end. A mass of power cables ran down them. Old Tang surmised that the end of River 6 was the communications center for the entire underground river. That meant it was also the wiring center for the telephone system. The power for this place was provided by the small-scale generator we'd come across in the sinkhole. From what Pei Qing and the others could see, the Japanese had neglected to burn their files, simply covering them up with canvas sheets instead. They must have been expecting to return. This ran contrary to all our experiences with abandoned Japanese installations. Once more I found myself at a loss as to what exactly had happened when the Japanese left. Just what had they been ordered to do?

After taking a rushed look around, Pei Qing and the others continued to follow the power cables, searching for the source of the telegram. Old Cat thought the survivors from the earlier exploration team would have waited here to be rescued. He whistled to alert them of our presence. This lonely whistle received not a single sound in response. In the end it was Old Tang and the former communications soldier who, after examining the countless electrical connections, located the telephone wire. It extended into a passage in the far recesses of the cavern. Old Tang led the way. About sixty feet into the tunnel, they began to smell an odor of decay. Then they saw the telegraph room. The automatic transmitter was inside. Next to it a canvas sheet covered something. Pei Qing lifted it off. Three corpses were underneath.

There were two men, one of them old, and a woman. All three were draped with khaki-yellow Japanese overcoats. Underneath, they wore PLA uniforms no different than ours. They had already begun to rot. Pei Qing didn't recognize them, but they had to be the survivors Old Cat was looking for. Well, not survivors, really. They'd been dead for some time.

The search team was extremely disheartened. They picked up the corpses and carried them out of the communication room. Pei Qing switched off the telegraph. It was still in the middle of an automatic transmission. Checking for cause of death, they discovered a black line along their gums, just like the corpse in the sinkhole. They seemed to have been poisoned to death. Old Tang had said he believed they'd been hit with some slow-acting toxin. Their deaths were far from sudden, giving them time to send the telegram. Old Cat had shaken his head and said no, that was impossible. If it was as Old Tang said, then why was there a survivor left to cover the three of them with a canvas sheet?

Usually a prospecting team will consist of no more than five to ten people. Counting these three, as well as the still-living Yuan Xile, the survivor Old Cat had guessed at, the dead soldier in the warehouse, the corpse in the sinkhole, and the madman Su Zhenhua—there might still be one or two more people we had yet to encounter.

Old Cat had ordered a group to continue searching the cavern while he and Old Tang discussed their next move. Pei Qing couldn't get close enough to hear what they were saying. The system of tunnels and passageways was complex. Searching was far from easy. The majority of the corpsmen Old Cat had brought along were new recruits, and Old Tang was a bit of a softie. When it came to technical skill, everyone looked to him, and he was an able fighter to boot, but when difficulties arose, he lacked either the force or the charm to spur others into taking the necessary risks. The soldiers were on the verge of giving up. Even the inscrutable Old Cat could see no way out. They could swear all they wanted—and indeed some of them did—but it was of no use. For the time being, they had no choice but to stop and take some R&R. While all this was happening, I had already led the headstrong deputy squad leader and the fearless Wang Sichuan into the sinkhole and on to the gigantic underground "River 1." At the time I had no special experience when it came to commanding soldiers, but I knew the sort of person it took to lead a squad well. A true officer should be like the deputy squad leader, obstinate in his need to carry out orders, brave and fierce like Wang Sichuan, and sly as Old Cat. Unfortunately, this sort of person was rare as could be.

As Pei Qing related their experiences to us, part of it seemed somehow illogical. Of course, Pei Qing spoke with a heavily accented form of Mandarin. I don't know how many years Mandarin education had already been popularized, but the effects of the campaign had yet to appear. He also spoke very rapidly, and I didn't have the energy to focus on every little detail. Still, though, it felt like something didn't add up. In the end, Pei Qing said, it was Old Tang, a leaves-no-stone-unturned kind of guy, who figured out something was amiss. It was the telegraph room.

During the War of Resistance, wireless telegrams were used for long-distance correspondence, but the transmitter had to be located at a high point. Mountains got in the way of the signal. Transmissions were generally only made across regions of flatland. So why install a transmitter in a limestone cave at the end of an underground river? This telegraph room had certainly been in heavy use. There was a Japanese codebook and a great deal of telegraphic data lying all about. The transmission antenna, though, didn't seem to be nearby. It was likely back on the earth's surface, they surmised, where it could be used to contact other bases.

If this telegraph was for communicating with bases above the surface, then was it purely by chance that the signal was transferred onto the phone line? Could it be that whoever sent the message had meant to transmit the signal all the way to the surface? One therefore had to ask: Had the signal been received? Had the 723 Project headquarters known all along there was something dangerous in this cave?

It was Pei Qing who raised this question. He asked Old Cat whether, before coming after us, he'd been told a whole slew of previously concealed information. From today's perspective, his question might seem overly direct, but given the way people dealt with each other back then, it really was the norm. Old Cat paid him not the least bit of mind. Who knows, he said. If the transmission antenna really does run all the way to the surface, then the wind and rain probably wrecked it a long time ago. This was rather intentionally missing the point. As they argued about it, Old Tang and the communications soldier went on fiddling with the automatic transmitter. Just as Pei Qing was preparing to lay into Old Cat again, Old Tang stopped them. He removed the headphones he'd been wearing and told them to listen. In addition to sending messages, the automatic transmitter could receive them as well. To verify what Old Cat had said about the surface-level antenna being broken, Old Tang had started up the machine's receiving function. The moment he did so, an urgent string of telegraphic code immediately piped through the headphones.

I was astounded. Although intercepting cables was not difficult, especially as this was the age of telegraphic code—prior, in other words, to the introduction of frequency-hopping transmitters—still, to do so often required a lengthy process of scanning frequencies. To receive a telegram the moment you switched on the receiver meant both this transmitter and its opposite were set to the same frequency. The chances of that happening accidentally were extremely minute. Listening to the transmission, the communications soldier said something was wrong with the coding method. It seemed to be pure gibberish. Old Tang and the soldier checked the Japanese codebook. The code sounding in their headphones was actually a Japanese military cipher. So where was the antenna and where was this message coming from?

Well, first, the cable couldn't have originated underground. That would have contravened physical laws. Second, in 1962, it would have been impossible for an antenna to receive a telegram from within Japan itself, much less one that was still using a military codebook from 1942. This cipher must have originated from someplace abandoned twenty years prior, probably some decrepit secret base nearby, left behind in the wilderness of Inner Mongolia.

None of them understood Japanese. So even with a codebook, they were unable to figure out what the cable meant. After the communications soldier listened to it for a considerable length of time, he realized that the content of the message continuously repeated. Its counterpart—wherever it was—must also be an automatic transmitter. Old Cat relaxed. Even though no one had been rescued, having found the source of the cable and this much data meant he could report the mission a success. They took detailed notes of the code being transmitted, dismantled the telegraph, packed it up along with the codebooks and deciphering equipment, and carried them out. Old Cat planned to return to the surface and let the professionals decode the message—see just what exactly the thing was saying—before deciding what to do next.

While packing everything up, Old Cat and the others had another pleasant surprise. One of the privates was going through a stack of data books when he discovered several engineering blueprints, one of which proved especially crucial. Only half the drawing could be made out, but in that legible section was a meticulous depiction of the area around the dam, the plane's takeoff structure, and all the underground river's various tributaries. Relying on this blueprint, they made their way through the branching paths of the limestone cavern. They entered a sinkhole and, following a group of power cables, navigated the tunnel system underneath for over ten hours until they finally reached one side of the dam. There were a couple minor adventures after that, and then they bumped into us.

Old Cat, Pei Qing, and the rest of them had obviously had it much easier than I. This made me rather resentful. We'd entered the sinkhole on the basis of a note. If it was one of them who'd given it to me, then some irresponsible person had pushed us into a situation of considerable danger. Of course, falling into that enormous underground river had been mostly our fault. Had that not happened, who knows how things might have gone?

Wang Sichuan had long since related our experiences to those present, even going so far as to tell them that, most likely, there was an enemy spy on the team. Old Cat's expression showed considerable displeasure. The list of dead was getting too long.

Telegraph room: three dead.

The generator in the sinkhole: one dead.

Workshop and warehouse: one dead and Su Zhenhua crazy.

Adding to this the madwoman Yuan Xile, then we'd already found seven of the first team, five of them dead—their deaths all abnormal—while those who'd survived had both gone crazy.

I told Old Cat that by now there were probably some things he should tell us. At the very least, I said, we need to know just how many people were on the first team. Pei Qing chimed in as soon as I said this, as did Wang Sichuan, Ma Zaihai, and the deputy squad leader. Pei Qing was quite agitated. His argument with Old Cat had gotten serious, and now he couldn't hold himself back.

Old Cat and Old Tang were both silent. For a moment, both sides were deadlocked, no one saying a word. At last Old Cat abruptly relaxed, sighed, and then spoke. "All right. But I can only tell you this one thing and you must not ask me again. There is no benefit in you knowing too much—not for me, nor for all of you either."

Go on and say it, I thought to myself. We understand. After we leave this place, no one will bring it up again.

Old Cat gave a rather strange laugh and said, "The first team entered here half a month ago. Nine people in total—four experts, four corpsmen, one specially appointed supervisor."

"Nine people?" Ma Zaihai gulped. "Then there are still two people we haven't found yet?"

Old Cat shook his head. "No," he said, "just one."

Ma Zaihai counted it out on his fingers, then counted again. Something was wrong.

"There was one person," said Old Cat, "who came out alive."

We stared at him in surprise. "Who was it?" asked Ma Zaihai.

Narrowing his eyes, Old Cat pointed at himself. "Me."