Xu Lei - Search for the Buried Bomber

Had he found the hidden channel? We tiptoed over, knelt down, and began to listen. We waited a moment, then, rather than the sound of water rushing beneath the rock, we heard something indescribable, almost like the noise of fingernails scratching against stone. We listened in silence for some time, but were unable to discern just what the sound was. We knew only that this noise, like thorns dragging against a chalkboard, was agonizing. It felt like claws being scraped against our hearts, provoking a terrible itch. All we wanted was to scratch it with all our might.

I’m not sure who was first to begin digging, but in a moment we had all joined in and were tearing the stones from the floor of the cave, first big ones, then the small ones. After having lifted several of the rocks, I realized that something was amiss. They were all far too easy to move. Of the shattered stones that lay nearby, some were large and some were small, but they always had much larger stones beneath them. Somehow, though, not a single one of the rocks from this spot was large enough to prevent us from tunneling deeper. What did it mean? In my curiosity I couldn’t help but increase my pace. This ferocity infected the rest of the group, and we began to work faster and faster. Then, with an audible clang , I knocked against something other than rock.

Everyone paused, stopped what they were doing, and looked over at me. A rust-covered sheet of iron lay beneath the stone I had just pulled from the pit. We stared at it for a moment, our expressions baffled. Then everyone gathered around me, ripping the hole wider. We soon uncovered a massive iron door, fifteen feet long by fifteen feet wide. Mottled green paint peeled from its exterior. The faded outlines of Japanese characters were just barely visible. “Plan 53” was all we could make out. Once the majority of the door had been uncovered, we put our ears to its surface and listened silently. The scratching sound had disappeared and from within the door not a noise could be heard.

It was a double door made of variously sized sheets of iron welded together. The door was astonishingly thick, with rivets as big as a thumb and overlaid with countless layers of cement and liquid steel. It was set inside a grooved iron frame and was sturdy enough that when we stood atop it, the door neither rocked nor flexed an inch. The two doors would open in unison from the center, where there were three huge torque-operated door handles. They had been welded immobile. Even the tiniest seams between the doors had been welded shut. No matter how hard we pulled, they failed to move at all.

The deputy squad leader gave the soldier at his side a certain inscrutable look, and the latter climbed onto the door and pressed down on it with all his weight. “It’s blastproof,” he said in a quiet voice. “There’s a false layer within the iron sheeting filled with mechanical springs and cotton batting.”

“Seems when the Japs left they had already decided not to return,” whispered Wang Sichuan. We all nodded.

Having reached this point and unable to go farther, how could we explain the appearance of Yuan Xile? And where were the others who had been with her? Even if they had all died, we should have stumbled across their corpses or, at the very least, some sign of their presence. What if she had entered the cave by herself? No, that could never have happened. Then I had a strange idea. Perhaps I was overthinking, but what if the reason the Japanese sealed the iron door hadn’t been to prevent others from getting in, but rather to prevent something inside from getting out?

We’d all seen Japanese bunkers while prospecting in the mountains of Inner Mongolia. We knew that once the Japanese decided to seal off an area, they made absolutely sure it would stay closed forever. Not only would they demolish all tunnels leading to the bunker, they’d also drill into its domed roof and load-bearing walls and set explosives for pinpoint directional blasting. The bunker’s entire structure would be thoroughly destroyed. This was the most effective way of ensuring that none of the data or other materials inside might fall into enemy hands and that the ruined bunker would never be usable again. Here the only thing blocking our way was the iron door. This was not at all how the Japanese usually did things.

But there was no use in thinking about it. The simple truth was, we had no chance of getting past the door with the equipment we had. This wasn’t a matter of being unprepared; only a massive blowtorch would suffice to open a door like this. Discovering the door had excited us. Surely there was some way of getting it open, we felt. But after kneeling and knocking and feeling about for the better part of an hour, we were utterly flummoxed. We looked at one another in blank dismay.

At last it was Pei Qing who said what we all were thinking: “What do we do now? Are we really going to have to go back like this?”

We all smiled bitterly. At this point, what was there left to do besides head back? It didn’t matter how much we wanted to keep going, with the door blocking our path there was no way for us to continue. This prospecting job had reached its end.

Honoring proper work procedure, we gathered hydrological and geological samples, made an approximate description of the iron door, then gathered our things and prepared to head back. The soldiers had grown weary of exploring and were thrilled to be returning to the surface. In addition to what they were already carrying, they hefted some of our belongings as well. After walking only a short distance, though, we noticed that something about the ground had changed. Before any of us could react, the deputy squad leader, marching out in front, realized what was going on. In a low voice, he spoke just two words: “Oh shit!”

We all looked down. At once it became clear: water was bubbling up through cracks in the cave floor, and it was coming out fast. We looked at one another, our faces pale. As prospectors and engineering corpsmen, we understood all too well what was happening. The underground river was rising!

“Run!” someone yelled, and immediately we dropped all of our equipment. We sprinted like mad in the direction we had come. A shiver ran down my spine: the terrain here was far too low!

Prior to beginning river-cave exploration or prospecting work, we were always warned to pay close attention to any rise in the level of groundwater. With torrential rainfall, smaller tributaries branching onto or off of large underground rivers may begin to overflow or flow backward, causing the water level to rise and creating an extremely dangerous situation.

But Inner Mongolia in the 1960s was suffering severe drought. When we entered the cave, the sky had been a clear and boundless blue—no clouds at all. Who would have guessed rain was on the way? And because the course of the river flowed under the rocky shoal, its rise must have been soundless. Suddenly, that sound of fingernails scratching against stone sprang into mind. My God, I thought, there had been nothing strange about that noise at all—we’d read about it in textbooks, just never heard it in real life. It was the sound of water rising up through a dry cave!

We truly were running for our lives. Anyone who lives by the ocean knows how fast the tide can rise, but underground rivers rise even faster. For the first several dozen strides the danger we were fleeing remained in our imaginations, but soon the water had overflowed the cracks and begun to wash across the cave floor.