Search for the Buried Bomber

CHAPTER 9





The Underground Shoal



The gunnysacks were piled five or six layers high. Many of those trapped within had struggled to free themselves, their arms and legs now protruding. In the end their iron fetters had simply been too strong. The corpses were desiccated, their expressions frozen in torment and pain. To examine them in detail was too much to bear.

As soon as we tried to move some of the bags, the wires would twist together and hold tight. Chen Luohu was terrified, utterly scared out of his wits. If he hadn't taken a piss when we first arrived, I suspect his pants would have been wet through. Pei Qing said nothing, his expression very composed. We dropped anchor. The deputy squad leader clambered up some rocks to have a look at our surroundings. The body-filled shoal continued for a long way. If there weren't a thousand corpses, then there were at least seven or eight hundred. It was a mass grave. As a prospector, a dead body is something you rarely come across. To see that many, suddenly and all at once, was chilling.

After discussing it as a group, we decided that these had to be workers captured by the Japanese. Moving a bomber deep underground piece by piece would require a huge amount of labor. When it came to negotiating this sort of terrain, there was no more nimble a transportation tool than a human being. Because these activities were strictly confidential, the workers had to be silenced once the job was done. This was the method they had used. Still, there was something strange about it: Why had they stacked the bodies in this specific location? No way could these "corpse bags" have been used as anything other than buffer bags. Was this the site of an explosion? What if the cave-in that caused these boulders to drop and shatter was actually manmade?

But after taking a look around, we couldn't find the slightest evidence of such a blast. Pei Qing said that deep in the crevices between the rocks you could see where the boulders had been made glossy and smooth by running water. Stones required tens of thousands of years to be scoured to that level of polish. The cave-in must have occurred long, long ago. Moreover, this location wasn't suitable for demolition work. It would be far too easy to cause a chain reaction across the layers of rock. And the buffer bags had been heaped in a very careless manner. It seemed likely they'd simply been abandoned here. What if these bags were merely extras?

It was now no longer possible to use the oxskin rafts. Our orderly plans were thrown into disarray. The deputy squad leader ordered his corpsmen to begin packing up the equipment. We were responsible for carrying a large portion of it as well. The deflated rafts were extremely heavy. Once we were ready and I shouldered my bag, the weight nearly pushed my feet through the rock.

We began to march, maneuvering ourselves hand over hand across the field of boulders, our progress beyond arduous. Before we had gone too far, we suddenly understood why the Japanese had stacked the corpses here. They were building a road. The piles of corpses filled the gaps between each massive boulder, leveling the path. A wave of nausea and a feeling of absolute terror overcame me. The soles of my feet prickled and I knew only that I wanted to get out of this place as soon as possible.

But you can't always get what you want. There was no easy way across the shoal. We were leaping from boulder to boulder with huge packs, like stuntmen in training. And if we stepped on the gunnysacks? Our entire foot would sink in, catching on the wire and requiring that we be cut free. We gritted our teeth and marched doggedly on, but in nearly three hours we'd gone little more than a kilometer and even the deputy squad leader had reached the limit of exhaustion. Wang Sichuan looked at me, panting for air. "Old Wu, at this rate, we're going to be camping in the mass grave tonight," he said.

He was right. Looking at the darkness up ahead, there was no way to tell how far it went. And hiking for another three hours was not possible. "If we have to, then so be it," I replied. "These are our compatriots. Dead all these years and they still haven't spent one night in peace. Tonight we will watch over them. Now, what's so bad about that?"

Chen Luohu promptly cut in. "I object."

This surprised me. "Well, then what do you propose?" I asked him.

"I think we ought to keep going and rest when we get out of here," he said. "Because…um…because we won't be able to rest well in this kind of place."

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. "Who wouldn't rest well?" said Wang Sichuan sarcastically. "I'm afraid only you'd have trouble falling asleep. What is it, Luohu, you afraid there's ghosts here?"

Chen Luohu's face immediately flushed a deep red. "Well, I am afraid," he quickly replied. "What's so terrible about that? My mom carried me but six months before giving birth. I've been deficient from the start, a natural coward. Can I be blamed for it? But being a coward never stopped me from serving my country. Whoever wants to laugh at me is laughing at a comrade."

Wang Sichuan and I exchanged a look—there was nothing to be done about this guy. "Spirits are nothing but superstition," I said. "Rock is a form of matter. Corpses are a form of matter. Better just to think of all this as stone. There's nothing to be afraid of. Besides, even if we walked a whole day, we still wouldn't get out of here. We just don't have that kind of strength."

"How do you know?" Chen Luohu replied. "It's pitch-black up ahead. We might walk another fifteen minutes and be out of here."

I thought about it, and he did have a point. If it were possible to sleep somewhere else, I too would rather not have to brace myself for the long night ahead. It was here that Pei Qing spoke: "We need not fight about it. Listen to the noises around us. Up ahead, the water still sounds very calm. The direction and flow of the river are not changing. And even if the edge of the water was just out of earshot, we'd still have another two to three hours to go. Now that we're exhausted, it's going to be impossible to maintain our previous pace or intensity. The road's going to be increasingly difficult for us. To continue would be inefficient—a waste of time and energy." His intonation was neither too fast nor too slow. He was very convincing. "It would be wisest to rest here," he continued. "I'm in support of setting up camp now, but perhaps we shouldn't stay as long as we might normally."

Wang Sichuan didn't care about estimates or anything. He was just pooped. "Three votes to one, majority rules," he joined in.

Pei Qing really does have his own way of doing things, I thought to myself. I wouldn't have expected so much from him. "Little Pei is top of the class," I said. "He looks at problems differently than us dummies. I agree with his analysis."

Wang Sichuan made a few gestures and at once the corpsmen set down all of their gear. Chen Luohu was mad as hell, but there was nothing he could do. His expression was terrible to look at, but we paid him no mind and began searching around for a suitable campsite. Soon enough, we'd located a large rock, dry and flat as a board. After climbing up, the corpsmen began to put our campsite in order while we unloaded our gear. Once we had set down all of our equipment, we felt much more relaxed. Pei Qing and a young corpsman then packed some basic supplies and set off to see just how much farther the rocky shoal went. If it continued for a long way, we'd be forced to leave some of our equipment behind or we'd be stuck here forever and never accomplish our mission. I didn't pay much attention to their departure and merely told them to be careful, but the deputy squad leader acted like he was in a movie. "You take good care of Mr. Pei!" he commanded the young soldier. We decided that if anything went wrong they would warn us by firing gunshots into the air.

We had our own matters. After tidying up the base, we made a fire and began cooking our military rations. Though we all wore waterproof ponchos, we were wet through and through. We stripped off our clothes and let them toast by the fire. My sleeping bag had been provided by the army. It had a big "US" stamp on it, and someone had told me it had been seized during the Korean War. I've never been too obsessed with cleanliness, so as soon as the bag began to heat up, the scent of mildew permeated the air. Wang Sichuan made me put it away.

Chen Luohu continued to sulk and ignore the rest of us, but Wang Sichuan and I talked and laughed between ourselves, and all the corpsmen took a similar attitude. There's a lot of turnover in military units: While it's great if people get along, there's no need to force it. After all, once the mission is over we all return to our respective homes, and who knows when we might meet again.

Our military rations consisted of condensed, dehydrated wheat flour and rice with accompanying packets of sugar and salt. Unwrapped, it was the size of one's finger, but once cooked it would fill the pot. Wang Sichuan got up to go draw some water, but as soon as he reached the edge of the rock and beheld the field of black bags and twisted wire, he changed his mind. "I think I'll just use the water I carried in," he said. Someone located a kettle and put it to boil. Together we sat and ate our rice-and-flour paste out of a big basin. It was almost inedible and tasted like medicine, but we made do.

As I ate, I began to consider some of the problems we might face. What was I to do once I had drunk all of my water? The more I thought about it, the more vexed I became. At the back of my mind I kept thinking: Should I be on the brink of dying of thirst, would I be able to drink my own urine? Surely that would be no time to be picky.

We'd finished our meal, but Pei Qing and the soldier still hadn't returned. We smoked and waited. The cigarettes I had at the time were an unruly combination of Harbin and Hengda brand tobacco. Either Wang Sichuan's salary or his connections weren't as good as mine, because he smoked Albanian brand cigarettes, which went for eighteen cents a pack. I could see that none of the soldiers were smoking anything good, just generic cigarettes, so I handed over a pack of Hengdas to the deputy squad leader and— no joke—he blushed all over from happiness. Even after smoking for a while, though, we still felt ill at ease. Not a word was spoken. We just gritted our teeth and kept puffing away.

Honestly, I could understand where Chen Luohu was coming from and, in several respects, he was braver than the rest of us. First of all, he had the courage to admit in front of everyone that he was afraid, and even if we weren't as scared as he was, no way were we entirely free of fear. The worst was eating dinner in that place. I could see how each man tried to behave with an air of complete indifference, but I knew how uneasy they really were. The feeling that people were watching us from every direction never slackened. Our shoulders grew tense from fighting the constant urge to turn our heads and look.

Wang Sichuan suggested I tell some jokes to lighten the mood. I'd worked for a long time as part of a prospecting team that included a number of young soldiers. They'd often ask to hear jokes and stories and I'd composed more than a few of them. Wang Sichuan had heard a few while we were living together, so he knew I had a gift for storytelling. Still, being asked out of the blue made me feel a little embarrassed. I usually liked to build up to the story subtly, talking about work, chatting about one thing or another, drawing the listener in, and then bring out the jokes. And of course, I couldn't tell scary stories here. I did have a good bit that I kept in reserve, though. It was about a prospector in Yunnan making a fool of himself with a young woman from an ethnic minority. The routine was truly hilarious, romantic as could be, and with punch line after punch line. I wasn't sure how long it had been since these young soldiers had seen a woman, but hearing this story would absolutely divert their attention.

As I was pondering the best way to begin—Bang! Bang! Bang!—three shots suddenly rang out, booming like a series of thunderclaps. We all leaped in surprise. The deputy squad leader clearly knew what he was doing; at once he tossed away his cigarette, hoisted his rifle, and headed off in the direction of the noise, the rest of the soldiers following closely behind. We had none of their superior agility, and I quickly lagged some sixty feet back. Wang Sichuan was too large and too heavy, and before long he had slipped down the side of one of the boulders and caught his foot in a gunnysack. Unable to pull it out, he began to call for my help. I didn't have time to worry about him. I yelled for Chen Luohu— farther back and nearly crawling flat on his stomach across the rocks—to give him a hand. Then I hurried onward.