Xu Lei - Search for the Buried Bomber

My mind was in chaos, my specific thoughts and feelings a mystery to me. Still, it was plain what had taken place here. Pei Qing nodded. I could see his brow begin to wrinkle. The same realization must have just occurred to him: Based on Yuan Xile’s attire, it was clear she too had been here on a prospecting assignment. She must have belonged to some unknown fifth group. And this fifth team must have entered the cave some time before us. Had they begun after we did, they’d never have been able to overtake us so quickly. Though the specifics were still unclear, we now knew that prospecting activity had taken place here prior to our arrival. Yuan Xile was the ironclad proof. The situation was a mess. All at once, a host of new problems had arisen. For example: If this group had been here before us, why hadn’t the colonel let us know? And given that Yuan Xile was a female prospector, there was no way the higher-ups would have let her explore the cave by herself. So where was everyone else?

The deputy squad leader was sitting in silence some distance away from us, surrounded by his soldiers. I went over and asked him how much of this he’d previously been aware of.

“Even less than you,” he said, shaking his head. “We entered the cave when you did, but that meeting you held beforehand, we didn’t even get that—just orders to accompany you and complete the mission. Nothing more.”

Everyone else was silent.

“Why not just ask her when she wakes up,” said Wang Sichuan.

I shook my head. Yuan Xile had just been through hell. The scariest thing about it was that she had been without a flashlight. For who knows how long this poor woman had been wandering lost through the caverns in pitch-black darkness. Imagine what she went through: stumbling through the limitless dark of a freezing cave, strange and nameless sounds echoing off the walls. There was no telling what condition she’d be in when she woke up.

“It’s useless,” Pei Qing added. “Even if she does wake up, she won’t tell us very much. Among those of her level, keeping quiet is a point of professional pride. Since she outranks all of us, it would be against protocol for her to say anything.”

“So what do we do now?” asked Wang Sichuan. “Goddamn it, what the hell were our superiors thinking? We’ve never been involved in a mess like this before. The best thing to do would be to just pull out. Is whatever the hell’s down here really worth dying for?”

“You should have realized on the long truck ride over that this assignment would be far different from any we’d worked on previously,” Pei Qing said, not looking at Wang Sichuan but past him, in the direction we had to travel. I saw a strange sort of anticipation pass through his eyes.

This guy is not normal, I thought. Looking at his face, you’d think what had happened so far made almost no difference to him. I thought once more of the note, but then my mind turned back to our current situation. Indeed, I too was more than a little curious about what was waiting at the end of the river. And why, I wanted to know, was the truth behind our predicament getting harder and harder to grasp the longer we were down here?

“I say you all should just stop discussing it,” said Chen Luohu. “If our brothers on the engineering team hear us talking like this, they’ll think we’re doubting the decisions of our superiors, and that won’t be good at all.” He had shrunk to one side, but kept speaking in a quiet voice. “We might as well continue on. There’s nothing to do but suck it up and keep going.”

Wang Sichuan stared at Chen Luohu, but I stopped him before he could say anything. This time Chen Luohu was correct. The engineering corpsmen thought differently than we did. We should take pains to say little in their presence that might make them think we were having second thoughts. “No matter what,” I said after thinking about it for a moment, “we can’t go anywhere until she wakes up and we ask her what’s going on. Even if we only find out a little, that’s better than nothing. At the very least, she should be able to give us some sort of explanation.”

Arange of thoughts and opinions were swirling about camp that night. None of us had seen a woman in a long time. To have one sleeping in our midst with her underwear toasting by the fire made it tough to fall asleep. I was exhausted, but wild fantasies kept me up. At last, I fell into a deep sleep.

After sleeping for who knows how long, I was nudged awake. I raised my head and looked around, but everything was blackness—the fire had been extinguished. Sitting up, I turned on my flashlight and shined it into the darkness. The sentry must have fallen asleep. I turned my head to see who had shaken me. It was Yuan Xile. She was squatting beside me, completely naked. I felt a jolt of fear. “You’re awake?” I asked her.

She made no reply, but moved closer and crawled onto my chest. A strange odor filled my nostrils. I felt dizzy. Yuan Xile was a northeasterner, and like most girls from that region she was voluptuous, her figure incredibly alluring. Though I wanted to push her off , my hands pulled her closer. The soft, smooth feel of her skin beneath my fingers made my hair stand on end, but I dared do nothing more. Unable to go further, unable to go back, I lay paralyzed. Suddenly, she opened her mouth wide. I watched as slowly, very slowly, a long piece of wire emerged from the black recesses of her throat.

I yelled in surprise and sprang off the ground. In a flash everything disappeared. I was still lying in my sleeping bag, the firelight glowing brightly. Chen Luohu, Pei Qing, and two of the soldiers were already awake. Wang Sichuan was nearby, snoring loudly. Yuan Xile had awoken as well and was already sitting by the fire, fully clothed and devouring a plate of food. Her hair was matted and one look at her movements was enough to know that something was wrong.

Laughing to myself, I reached down and felt the crotch of my trousers. Fuck, my old dad was right. The quicker I got married the better. Rubbing my eyes, I rose from bed, washed my face in cold water, and glanced over at Pei Qing. “How is she,” I asked him.

Pei Qing shook his head. “Looks like she’s had nothing to eat for a very long time.”

“Has she said anything?”

He sighed. “You’d better ask her yourself.”

Seeing Pei Qing’s expression and hearing his tone of voice, I could tell that no pleasant surprises awaited me, but it wasn’t until I went over and attempted to talk to her that I discovered how dark the situation actually was. She was curled up into herself and scarcely aware of anything. She seemed absent, her entire being deeply distracted. As soon as I spoke, she turned to stare fixedly at me, but no matter what I asked she never responded. The look in her eyes was somehow dispersed, unable to focus. She’d been wandering in the dark for far too long and was now struggling to adjust her eyes to the light. Still, her face remained delicate and lovely. Just looking at it was enough to make my heart ache. To think what had become of this poor woman.

At last I gave up. Pei Qing brought me some breakfast and sat down. He gave a deep sigh. “It’s just too pitiful,” he said. Pei Qing reckoned it had been the lights of our camp that had drawn Yuan Xile to us out of the darkness. He said he’d gone through her clothes and rucksack and all her food was completely gone. Who knew how long she had been wandering through the caverns? Had we arrived just a little later, she would almost certainly have been dead.