Search for the Buried Bomber

CHAPTER 6





Splitting Up



So it went like this: There were twenty-three of us prospectors in total. We were going to be split into four groups of four, with the remaining seven acting as reserve and support. A few engineering corpsmen would also join each group for protection and to help carry equipment. There's a big difference between prospectors and engineering corpsmen. Prospectors are special-technician troops attached to the wider geo-prospecting/engineering brigade, while engineering corpsmen are much more like standard troops with a little extra training. We had it much easier than they: far fewer military rules and regulations and a respectable military rank. We were the brains and they were the necessary brute force. Of course, we'd once been fit like them, but as our volume of work increased over the years, we let our conditioning slip. Now we needed the engineering corpsmen, especially during cave exploration. The ropes were extremely heavy, and we needed a great deal of them to get past the steep cliffs and wide crevasses we were likely to encounter. The more people available, the easier it was to travel great distances during exploration. The new enlistees could march thirty kilometers with twenty kilograms on their backs. I don't know what exactly they were carrying, but they didn't seem too distressed.

Remembering what Old Cat told me, I tried to stay toward the back of the group, hoping to be kept in reserve. The groups, however, were divided based on age. Being relatively young, I was placed in the second group with Wang Sichuan and two men from Shaanxi, Pei Qing and Chen Luohu. I'd worked with these men before at the massive oil-extraction project in Karamay, off in the Northwest. Later, we'd often run into each other when one of us was leaving a project and the other was going in. I'd never really gotten to know them before, but I guess we'd have the chance now.

Pei Qing was going prematurely gray. Although his pure white face made him look quite young, that silver hair gave him a fierce and imposing aspect. He had a bit of arrogance about him. It was said he was highly educated and the technical backbone of his unit. He didn't talk much, but I heard he was a real lady-killer. Chen Luohu was Pei Qing's polar opposite: he'd risen from the very bottom through hard work, but he still didn't even speak proper Mandarin. He'd laugh like a donkey whenever anyone told a joke, no matter what it was about. "Aw, you don't say! Isn't that hilarious!" he'd guffaw. He could laugh all day about any little thing— which was quite entertaining for us—but there was also something treacherous about him, a sense of caution in how he approached everything, like an ambitious low-level bureaucrat. None of us relished having to deal with him.

Five men from the fourth squad of the sixth company of the Inner Mongolian engineering corps were coming with us. Their deputy squad leader's name was something like "Kangmei," but I'd never heard of the other four. We made no formal introductions at the time, just saluted, noted the fresh faces, and left it at that.

The deputy squad leader carried a Type 56 assault rifle (a Chinese copy of the Kalashnikov). The other four soldiers had Type 54 submachine guns, and they loaded us all down with ammo. Wang Sichuan told them they were being more than a little excessive: wild animals might be lurking in the caves of the South, but the most we'd find here were bats. The temperature in the cave was too low to support cold-blooded animals, and there was no way a larger animal, like a bear, would be able to negotiate the vertical descent. The only problems we needed to worry about were staying warm and having enough oxygen, though the engineering corpsmen didn't seem to be preparing for that. Soldiers never listen to our advice.

We prospectors refused to carry guns and merely strapped on Sam Browne belts (wide leather belts with a shoulder strap). We were each assigned different pieces of equipment. I was given a geologist's shovel and hammer, for which I felt fortunate, as each could be used for self-defense and neither was particularly heavy. Wang Sichuan was made to carry the cutlery. It clattered and jingled as he walked, and he made his dissatisfaction very clear to us.

After finishing our preparations, we were hooked to the towrope and lowered one by one into the mouth of the cave. I can still remember swinging back and forth, trying to keep my balance, for what seemed like hours. I prefer to swing down on my own. It's much smoother than being lowered in by pulley. Honestly, scaling cliff faces has become fairly routine for me, and I wouldn't consider a six-hundred-something-foot descent to be all that deep. I once climbed a cliff in Shandong far more formidable than this one. Sunlight illuminated the first stretch of the descent, but after ninety feet the cave began to twist and the sky disappeared. Fifteen or so feet below that, I entered into total darkness. I could see beams of light glimmering from the bottom. I glanced about at the cliff rock. It was clearly limestone from the Cambrian and Ordovician periods, meaning this was a complex cave—in possession of the features of both limestone and tectonic caves. The cave bottom was as big as a soccer field and, as I neared the ground, I could see it was mostly covered by slow-moving water. An underground river—a common feature of limestone karst caves.

Many provisional steel shelves had been erected on the cave floor. I wasn't sure whether the Japanese had left them or if we'd set them up. The shelves were packed with large gas lamps and the army-green bags that had been lowered earlier. Engineering corpsmen were busy unpacking the oxskin rafts from inside the bags. Several had already been blown up and were calmly floating atop the dark river. The water itself didn't appear very deep. Many soldiers were standing in the river with rubber galoshes. Wang Sichuan had descended before me and was off to one side, shining his flashlight across the cave walls. He'd even lit up a cigarette.

As soon as I touched down, my professional habits took over. I flipped on my flashlight and joined those around me in scanning about the dark cave. Years ago, when I first became a prospector, caves held a strong sense of enchantment for me. I loved standing amid those dark walls, running my fingers across the earth's secrets. I always felt as if I'd come to a place that did not belong to the human world. We prospectors often considered caves the blood vessels of the mountains. While exploring their deep tunnels, we sometimes felt a strange sort of air, almost like breath, pass over us. How natural it would seem—the mountains were alive. Now, though, I look at caves like a gynecologist searching for illness—I only pay attention to what I have to.

I'd been in a cave like this in Shanxi. We call them "Pits of Heaven," because they seem to appear out of nowhere as if some god had smashed them into the earth. Pits of Heaven are often terribly deep. This one, though, was significantly more complex than the others I'd been in. Something about it felt different. Part of it had to be that this was a complex cave, one with both limestone and tectonic features. Caves like this are formed by tectonic activity and water erosion occurring simultaneously. They are dotted with thousands of watery trenches and ravines, crisscrossed by jagged rocks of grotesque shape. They have extremely complicated tunnel systems. Normal watery limestone caves tend to be relatively easy to explore. You can navigate the length of their underground rivers by oxskin raft, rarely encountering more than a few obstacles. The dark rivers of tectonic caves, however, often conceal extremely irregular faults. You could be floating along, smoking a cigarette, and suddenly come upon a three-hundred-foot waterfall crashing into the blackness. Run into one of those and you're dead for sure. We try not to go too deep in tectonic caves.

This time there was no escaping it. I turned to tell some corpsmen they'd better tie some rocks to the raft anchors to weigh them down, but Chen Luohu was already instructing them. I jumped down into the water. It didn't reach my knees, but the cold struck at my heart and seeped into my bones. I took in my surroundings: the walls were all limestone. Seeing Wang Sichuan, I walked up behind him. He was concentrating intently on one of the cliff walls. He noticed me as I walked over and motioned for me to take a look at something. I shined my flashlight on a portion of rock. The wall seemed polished, as if it were covered in a layer of wax. He then used his flashlight to point out several other spots that all bore similar markings. I stared at it for a moment, then glanced up at him, that "Now what do you think that means?" look in my eye.

"What you're looking at is glazing," he said quietly. "Meaning that, at some point, there was most likely a violent explosion somewhere in this cave."